


sometimes love happens like clockwork, other times like a car accident

by Thealmostrhetoricalquestion



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Humor, Car Accidents, Developing Relationship, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Major Character Injury, Monster of the Week, Multi, Pack Bonding, Pack Feels, Slow Build, Spark Stiles Stilinski, Technopathy, Witches
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-24
Updated: 2016-03-19
Packaged: 2018-04-27 22:16:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 25,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5066521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thealmostrhetoricalquestion/pseuds/Thealmostrhetoricalquestion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles genuinely had no idea if what he could do was some form of magic, or a curse, or something to do with his spark. As best he could guess, it was something he was born with, but it didn’t seem to run in the family. He’d never caught Dad soothing the coffee maker in the mornings with hushed whispers. The coffeepot was highly strung and it seemed to suffer a bout of nerves every other day. Stiles was the only one who could calm it down. </p><p>Then again, as far as he knew, Stiles was the only one who could do what he did. </p><p>(Or the one where Stiles is a techno-path and it's a secret. Kinda. It's complicated.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Car Accident

**Author's Note:**

> Basically, Stiles can understand a lot of inanimate objects, a lot of technology, in the way that other people can't. I feel like Stiles has a lot of hidden power in that spark, this is me utilising it and ignoring the laws of science at the same time.  
> Also, there are these evil box-trolls that are partly made of machinery.  
> And some swear words, and canon-typical violence.  
> Huzzah.

“Do not start with me,” Stiles warned his computer. The computer bristled, a few keys clicking indignantly. Stiles glanced down, watching the same four keys move over and over again. The F key featured prominently. He stifled a grin. _Start with F, end with U._

“I mean it,” Stiles said, making small circles on the track pad with his finger. It normally soothed her. “I’ve got important work to do. Derek’s demanded a whole truck-load of information and God knows he can’t pick up a book or something. That would simply be criminal. Why do work when Stiles can do it for you? It’s not like he has homework, or a life or anything.” 

Stiles rolled his eyes. There had been a fresh wave of strange attacks in the town, attacks that couldn’t be traced or tracked by any of the supernatural creatures currently residing in Beacon Hills. All Scott had said was that the scent was 'vaguely oily', which was less than helpful. That left Stiles and his unruly computer, plus the combined brains of Lydia and Deaton and the rest of the pack. 

“C’mon,” Stiles pleaded. “You know I can’t do this without your help. I’d be lost without you.” 

His screen glowed suddenly, the brightness turned up full whack. Stiles grinned triumphantly as the internet kicked in and the page began to load, properly this time. His curser unfroze and Stiles quickly began to scroll through the website.

His phone beeped forlornly from somewhere in his room. Stiles winced, murmuring a few reassurances in the direction of his bed. Honestly, he was a little ashamed of the way he treated his phone. He constantly left it uncharged, screen blank and sad. At the moment, he wasn’t even sure where it was; he had thrown it with his schoolbag the moment he rushed into his room. That was probably why the computer had been in such a mood with him. She was touchy about his phone. 

“I’ll get to you soon buddy,” Stiles promised his phone, partly to reassure the phone and partly so that the computer wouldn’t throw another hissy fit. The website he was looking at was pretty unhelpful. There was nothing about supernatural creatures that liked to steal. Most of the monsters they had come across in Beacon Hills had a fondness for maiming and severely injuring people, maybe a bit of murder if they had the time. Nothing to do with looting vampires or fairy thieves. 

The front door slammed open downstairs, and then slammed shut again. Stiles winced as the motion reverberated through the house; the very framework seemed to shudder. 

“Someone with a little bit of extra strength, then,” Stiles muttered to himself. 

“There’s been another attack,” Scott said, skidding to a silent halt in Stiles’ bedroom doorway. 

“Why do we keep calling them attacks?” Stiles asked. He sent a quick, pleading look at his printer, which whirred to life reluctantly. Pieces of paper began to float down from the broken tray, fresh ink still gleaming wetly in the low afternoon light. 

“What do you mean?” Scott said distractedly. His head was bent over his phone, fingers flying over the keys. Stiles winced as the phone was shoved into Scott’s pocket. Sure, he wasn’t the best person to talk to when it came to phones, but he couldn’t help but react to the muffled complaints echoing from Scott’s crowded pocket. At least it wasn’t as bad as when he dropped his phone in the pool. That was a memory Stiles did not relish, well, remembering. 

“These things, whatever they are,” Stiles said, sweeping one hand out in front of him, “They aren’t actually attacking anything. Nobody’s even been hurt.” 

“Yet,” Scott cut in, ominously. 

“Nobody’s been hurt,” Stiles repeated, emphasising the words. “They’re just taking things. Not even valuable things, either. Where was it this time?” 

“The old antique shop,” Scott said, after a pause. Stiles gave him a dry look. 

“Because that’s just chock-a-block full of money and weapons, right? Shall I give the call to evacuate the town?” 

Scott rolled his eyes. His phone was still grumbling, and the watch around his wrist winked at Stiles. Stiles almost winked back, but caught himself just in time.

“It’s full of expensive stuff, at the very least,” Scott said, shifting his weight impatiently. “It’s been ransacked, but Danny knows the owner apparently, so they’re letting us sort   
through it all. Everyone’s already there. Are you coming or not?” 

“Danny knows everything and everyone,” Stiles muttered grumpily. The other boy still wouldn’t let on as to how he knew about werewolves, or anything else for that matter. 

“Come on, Stiles,” Scott said, although he had a fond grin on his face. “I promise not to separate you from the love of your life for more than a couple of hours.” He indicated the computer with a jerk of his head, hands stuffed in his pockets. Stiles wanted to tell him to remove them, give his phone some breathing room, _jeez_. 

“Alright, alright,” Stiles said, standing up and snatching up his jacket. Scott grinned and disappeared, sprinting down the stairs so quickly that Stiles could barely see him. Stiles muttered a thank you to his room and then shut the door, but not before his printer clicked happily and his computer hummed. 

*

The Jeep was maybe Stiles’ favourite part of whatever kind of power he had. Stiles genuinely had no idea if what he could do was some form of magic, or a curse, or something to do with the spark. As best he could guess, it was something he was born with, but it didn’t seem to run in the family. He’d never caught Dad soothing the coffee maker in the mornings with hushed whispers. The coffeepot was highly strung and it seemed to suffer a bout of nerves every other day. Stiles was the only one who could calm it down. 

Then again, as far as he knew, Stiles was the only one who could do what he did. 

The Jeep, though, was a very different story to a nervous coffeepot. The Jeep thrummed with life and energy. It reacted to every nudge of his fingers, to his slightest thought. For Stiles, the Jeep roared. For everyone else, it grumbled. That was exactly why he didn’t let others drive the Jeep. It understood him, and he understood it. 

Sometimes, even passengers unnerved the Jeep. It was used to Scott, but the first time Isaac had ridden shotgun, the Jeep had had a tantrum halfway down the road and come to a jarring stop. Isaac had smacked his nose against the dashboard and promptly abandoned the vehicle, swearing colourfully. 

Stiles was only slightly ashamed to say that he had laughed. 

“Stop here,” Scott said, pointing out of the open window. He had left his bike at Stiles’ house, claiming that it was easier to carpool. Stiles was dubious; it was more likely that Scott might convince Allison to get a ride back with them, in the Jeep. Allison wouldn’t go near the bike. 

Stiles pulled to a stop outside the antique shop. He recognised Derek’s car, the new family friendly version as opposed to the beautiful and _extremely high-maintenance_ Camaro. Stiles had never met a car with as much attitude as the Camaro. 

He stroked his fingers along the Jeep’s dashboard, crooning and grinning. Scott sighed in exasperation, but he couldn’t hide his grin. This was one thing that Stiles didn’t mind revealing- his love for his Jeep. Besides, Scott seemed to get a kick out of teasing Stiles about his unnatural bond with his car. 

“Derek’s waving us in,” Scott announced, unbuckling his belt. His jaw was a little tight, as it always was when Derek was mentioned, but Scott had moved past mindless, pointless anger and into reluctant tolerance. The business with the kanima had brought everyone into a grudging arrangement. Not a pack, not yet, but close enough. 

“I can see Allison,” Stiles said, just to watch the lines on Scott’s face soften. They both clambered out of the Jeep, Stiles saying goodbye with a quick brush of his fingers. 

The inside of the antique shop was a wreck. The bell above the door chimed dully as they pushed inside. Stiles could see the beginnings of order in all the chaos: bits and pieces piled up in corners; empty cardboard boxes ready to receive ornaments and other fragile thing; and an array of trash bags that ranged from empty to half-full of broken glass. 

“Damn,” Stiles said, and then let out a low whistle. 

“Thank you,” Lydia said primly. Stiles snorted and tipped an imaginary cap in her direction. She had appeared from behind the front desk, which was trashed and scraped and splattered with something black and slick. Stiles was just grateful that it wasn’t blood. 

As he stepped forward, something washed over him. It was a feeling of _wrongness_ so strong and overpowering that Stiles stopped, shuddering. There was something amiss in this room, something that scratched and clawed at his chest. He caught sight of Scott’s curious gaze and shook it off uneasily, pasting a blank look on his face. 

Scott drifted sideways, over to where Allison was stood, examining a small glass ornament with steady archer’s fingers. Isaac was there too, hovering over Allison’s shoulder. He smiled tentatively at Scott, who grinned back. Stiles tried not to read too much into that. 

“Where’s everyone else?” Stiles asked Lydia, picking his way across the room towards her. He wouldn’t put it past himself to trip and break something expensive and centuries old. 

“Erica and Boyd stayed at the house with Peter,” Lydia said. She was flicking through the register, writing down people’s numbers with thin, looping letters. 

“Whoever did this left the back rooms mostly untouched, but there are some kind of tracks on the floor, so Derek and Jackson are back there with Danny, since he’s the one with all the keys to this place. Apparently there’s a strange scent near the windows, too.” 

“So we might finally have a lead,” Stiles said, with a relieved grin. He was a getting tired of combing through the internet and finding nothing of use. “Did you and Deaton find anything over the weekend?” 

Lydia shook her head. Her hair was half-up, half down, handfuls of curls brushing her shoulders. Stiles might not be quite as much in love with her as he had been, having accepted the reality of their relationship, but he still thought she was beautiful. He would probably always think she was beautiful. 

“No. The one clue that we did have, the oil cans, didn’t have any kind of magical trace for us to follow. Deaton called in half of his contacts and they came up with nothing.” Lydia slammed the register shut with a frustrated sigh. “I don’t even know why I’m doing this. I just want to be useful, I suppose.” 

Stiles could relate to that. He didn’t exactly have a position in this group. He supposed his only worthwhile contribution was his ability to research, and his position within the county police force. He lowered his voice, tried to make it as comforting as possible. “Hey, you are being useful.” 

Lydia gave him a look, and Stiles shook his head firmly. “No. None of us know what we’re supposed to be doing, you know. We’re not supposed to know, there isn’t exactly a handbook for this kind of stuff. You’re smarter than all of us combined. Just do what you can, follow your instincts.” 

Lydia gave him a wry smile. “Smarter than all of you, huh?” 

“Don’t play dumb,” Stiles said, grinning. “It doesn’t suit you. 

Lydia sniffed indignantly. “That’s true, at least.” 

There was a crash from the store room, and then a stream of curse words. Stiles recognised Jackson’s dulcet tones and couldn’t bring himself to be too concerned. Scott, however, shot past Stiles and through the small door in the corner of the shop. Stiles raised an eyebrow at Lydia, who shrugged one shoulder delicately. 

Derek appeared in the doorway, a hulking mass of muscle in a surprisingly soft-looking sweater. “There’s some kind of seal on the back window. It has elements of wolfsbane and some kind of chemical in it. All of you stay clear of the exit points, except the front door.” 

Then he disappeared again. 

“Always so dramatic,” Stiles muttered, and then stalked towards the nearest window. There were bits of glass and broken china on the floor. Behind each window was a box table covered in cloth, where products could be displayed to passers-by. Each box table had been trashed, broken trinkets littering the ripped cloth.

Stiles leaned over one to get a better look at the windows themselves. Sure enough, there was a sticky black substance across the base of each sheet of glass. It looked murky, and familiar. Stiles whipped around. It was the same stuff that spattered the desk, he was sure of it. 

“Lydia,” he called. “If you’ve got your science kit with you, get a swab of that black stuff on the front of the desk. I think it’s the same stuff that’s on the windows.” 

Lydia nodded sharply, walking with business-like purpose towards her bag, where Stiles was sure a small briefcase lay hidden, full of all kinds of basic scientific equipment. “I’ll get a swab of each substance, just in case. I’ll measure them at Deaton’s.” 

She smiled decisively, and Stiles felt his chest grow warm. There was a bit of love there, still. It wasn’t going away any time soon, but Stiles thought that it might grow into something else. Maybe a familial kind of love. 

Stiles stepped carefully over a trash bag, headed for Allison, when his foot caught on something hard. Again, the feeling of wrongness washed over him. It felt like pins and needles, and sickness, and dizziness all at once. Light-headed, Stiles glanced down and nudged the thing with his foot. A clock appeared from beneath the trash bag. It was a gold thing, an old-fashioned model with a large, cracked glass face and two bronze bells. 

Stooping, Stiles snatched it up and turned it over in his hands. The feeling intensified. Stiles had to swallow hard against the sickness, slam his eyes shut against the dizziness that rolled up over him like an unrelenting wave. There was just something fundamentally wrong here. 

He turned it back around to examine the face. The hands weren’t moving at all, and yet Stiles could hear ticking, quiet and watery, as if dulled by an invisible sheet of plastic. Frowning, Stiles flipped it back over and pried off the backing with bitten nails. 

He almost threw up. 

Inside, there was nothing. No cogs or gears or bits of metal, no mechanism, no anything. Stiles placed one shaking finger on the bells and stroked it, soothing. The ticking quieted, growing fainter and fainter. It was wrong. It was so entirely wrong that Stiles didn’t have words for it. The heart of the clock, and the mind and _the everything_ had been scooped out, the backing replaced with carelessness. 

The very essence of it was gone. 

Stiles didn’t understand his power. Maybe it came from him, maybe it didn’t. Maybe he gave these things life, animated them, or maybe his power just let him understand them, gave him the means to listen, to communicate. Either way, it tied him to things, things that weren’t quite living but that worked just like he did. Cars and computers and coffeepots and clocks. Things with their own way of working. Things with a potential for life. 

The clock in his hands no longer had any potential at all. It was just an empty shell. 

The ticking quieted altogether, disappearing. In fact, Stiles thought sadly, it had never really been there at all. It had just been an echo of something that was long gone now. Like when he turned a corner in his house and thought he heard his mum’s voice, her singing or a bit of speech. 

Stiles glanced around the antique shop. Normally, he coped a lot better with things like this. People dropped their phones around him every day, smashed something, tore something, broken it irreparably. It didn’t break Stiles, although it made him feel a little ill. But this, this was different. This was on purpose. 

It couldn’t just be the clock. 

Quickly, Stiles pulled a cardboard box towards him. He filled it with some newspaper and gently laid the clock in it. Then he glanced around. There was a typewriter nearby, which he grabbed and examined. The keys had been removed, the intricate mechanisms inside it stripped out. He gulped back bile and added it to the box. 

It went on for a good ten minutes. He zipped around the shop, ignoring Isaac’s sneer and Allison’s bewildered gaze, gathering up clockwork toys that were no longer clockwork, lamps with every useful thing removed, items stripped of their essence. He piled them all into the box and then hauled it outside, towards the Jeep. 

Roscoe creaked in horror when Stiles opened the trunk and placed the box inside. He grimaced, patting the trunk as he left. 

“What the hell was that about?” Lydia asked dryly, when Stiles returned. They were all gathered now, faces an odd mix of blank and confused, and it Jackson’s case, delighted. 

“Finally cracked, have you?” Jackson said, sneering at him. Lydia hit him in the shoulder without once tearing her eyes away from Stiles. It was extremely unnerving. 

Stiles looked at Derek instead. “Everything in here, the things that require something to make them work, they’ve had all of the important components removed. All of the gears and cogs and everything, it’s all gone. Even the light bulbs in all of the lamps are missing.” 

Derek raised an eyebrow. His handsome face was frowning, but there was a light in his eyes, something that ushered Stiles onward. 

“I think that was the purpose of this attack,” Stiles said quickly. “Or raid, as it were.” 

“It’s an isolated incident, and we’ve had three attacks before this,” Derek said quietly. He looked intrigued though. No matter what Derek said Stiles knew the other man trusted his judgement, at least as far as it came to keeping Beacon Hills safe. 

“I don’t think it’s isolated at all,” Stiles argued, but then fell silent as Derek held up a hand. Normally he wouldn’t bother listening to Derek, but there was something in his face that begged him to listen. 

“We’ll take this back to the loft,” Derek said. “Erica and Boyd should hear this too, and as much as I hate to admit it, Peter might have some useful input.”

“We’ve gleaned pretty much everything we can from here anyway,” Scott added, squaring his shoulders. “Now it just needs cleaning up.” 

There was a pause

“I volunteer Jackson,” Stiles said loudly, clapping his hands together. 

*

The loft became surprisingly small when they all crammed themselves into the space. Jackson and Lydia curled up together on one chair. Allison commandeered a table to clean her bow on, and Scott stood beside her, glancing nervously at Erica and Boyd. Stiles knew that things were still a little shaky there, and though Allison had apologised for shooting them full of arrows, the beta’s seemed unwilling to forgive her. Stiles couldn’t exactly blame them, although he wasn’t all that fond of Erica and Boyd either. 

Hitting him with a piece of his own car had put a bit of a dent in his relationship with Erica, and the fact that he hadn’t been able to rescue them weighed heavily on his shoulders. 

Basically, their entire pack was a clusterfuck of a time bomb, waiting to explode. 

Isaac appeared in the doorway, the last box from the antique shop tucked away under his arm. Stiles was cross-legged on the floor, guarding his own box from judgemental stares and raised eyebrows. He felt hollow, being so closed to it, but he didn’t want to hand it over to anyone else. 

Derek descended the stairs, wearing a new sweater that wasn’t covered in the wolfsbane concoction from the windows. It looked good on him, a light blue that made the older man look softer somehow. The scowl on his face spoilt the image somewhat. 

“What have we found out then?” Derek said, straight to the point, leaning against the counter. 

Lydia cleared her throat delicately. “I’ve checked the substance on the windows and the desk. It’s the same, and it seems to be oil mixed with a strain of wolfsbane. I’ve sent a sample to Deaton to analyse, but I doubt there’ll be anything else in there.” 

“Are we talking scented oils here, like lavender, or something else?” Stiles said. He had one hand in the box, thumb pressed to the face of the clock. He could still feel the echo of pain and panic. 

Lydia rolled her eyes. “Motor oil, I believe. Something that’s used in cars and engines, although I can’t say I’m an expert on the subject.” 

“There’s a first,” Jackson muttered under his breath. Stiles had to stifle a grin. 

“Motor oil doesn’t repel supernatural creatures,” Scott pointed out. “The wolfsbane, I can understand.” 

“I can’t,” Stiles said, frowning. “There’s no reason to put wolfsbane on the windows. It wasn’t on the door, which is the main point of entry for most people, unless you’re a Hale who likes to make an entrance.”

Derek smirked, and in the corner of the room, by the window, Peter rolled his eyes. 

“Anyway,” Stiles continued, “if we’re assuming the people behind the raids are supernatural, then why put something that they’re most likely repelled by on the windows after they’ve left?”

“It wasn’t on the other buildings,” Lydia said. “We found traces of oil, but no wolfsbane.” 

“Maybe they were watching us,” Boyd suggested. Stiles jumped. Boyd had always been pretty quiet, but he and Erica had been pretty meek upon return. “They might have spotted us investigating and decided to see what they were up against. The wolfsbane might have been a way of feeling us out, testing who was human in our group.” 

“Pack,” Derek corrected absently. He had been doing that ever since Boyd and Erica had returned, as if saying it would make it true. Hell, maybe it would, Stiles didn’t know. Stiles didn’t know half as much as he would like to when it came to the supernatural. 

“It’s a solid theory,” Derek said. “But we still don’t know what they are, or what they want.” 

“The money was in the register at the shop,” Lydia said slowly. “I looked. There was at least four hundred in there. Small shops tend to keep more in their registers than big supermarkets, since they’re less likely to get robbed. But they hadn’t even opened the thing.” 

“They didn’t steal from the garage either,” Stiles pointed out, thinking back over the last attacks. “The money was all still there, and considering how much those bastards over-charge for just a tyre change, you know they’re packing a lot of bills.” 

“So what are they taking?” Erica said, frowning. “What was missing from the shop?” 

Jackson snorted. “Fuck all.” 

Allison rolled her eyes. “He’s right, although I wouldn’t have put it like that.” Scott gave her a gooey smile that made Stiles shudder. 

“The shop was in a complete mess,” Allison went on. “There was nothing really missing though. All of the big, expensive items were still there. The furniture was tipped over, but nothing had been taken out of the shop. Even the jewellery was still in its place.” 

“So we’ve established that they aren’t in it for the money,” Derek said slowly. He leaned against the banister, hands in the pockets of his jeans. He was frowning thoughtfully, and   
Stiles couldn’t help but watch the planes in his face, the soft line of his jaw. He dragged his eyes away. “They would’ve emptied the registers and made off with anything worth selling. There must have been more than one of them, judging by the amount of mess they made and how quickly they did it.” 

“No one saw them?” Boyd asked. Derek shook his head. 

“It was the same as the other raids,” Stiles said, taking over the explanation. “Early hours of the morning, no one on guard. No signs of a break-in until the owner actually got inside. Mess everywhere, everything ruined, but nothing taken. In and out in about an hour, I’d say. There weren’t any security cameras, since it’s just an antique shop. Danny said the owner didn’t bother with any.” 

“So, you’re telling me,” Jackson said, one hand on his temple, “That a bunch of wannabee Flynn Riders broke into an antique shop, messed everything up, smeared shit all over the windows and then left empty-handed, all in under an hour?” 

“I love that you know who Flynn Rider is,” Stiles muttered. Lydia flashed him a grin, and Jackson bared his teeth. 

“That’s about it though,” Scott said, obviously a bit reluctant to agree with Jackson. 

“Wait,” Stiles said, realisation slowly dawning on him. He withdrew his hand from the box and looked at it with an air of wonder. “Empty-handed.” 

He was well aware that the pack was looking at him like he was insane. He was also well aware that he had just stumbled upon something that he couldn’t explain to them. 

His power was a secret. Stiles had spent years researching it on the sly, once he was old enough to want to know, but it wasn’t an answer that just presented itself to you. Stiles still had no idea what he could do, or what it was that he did, or why he could do it. He didn’t know when he had started to class things as people, or at least on the same emotional level as people. But it had happened, and as much as he didn’t understand his power, he still loved it, and it was most definitely a secret. 

It had to stay a secret. 

This wasn’t something that Stiles could explain, unlike werewolves. Werewolves had a history, a story, something that ran deep within the earth and resonated with humans and creatures alike. Stiles was an anomaly. 

“Empty-handed,” Stiles repeated. He glanced up at the pack. Scott was beginning to look concerned, and Jackson was making the universal sign for _not wired up right_. 

“What are you blathering on about?” Lydia demanded. She looked curious, and a little worried, and Stiles knew she was trying to get him back on track. 

“They didn’t leave empty-handed.” 

He tipped the box over, and the shells of things pooled in front of him with a loud clatter. He fumbled with a jewellery box, unfastening it. 

“Look,” he said. “Look, the box is still intact, but the wind-up key’s gone, and the spring’s been ripped out. The mechanism inside that makes the noise is gone, too.” 

He turned the box around to show the hole inside the jewellery box. It looked as if a miniature fist had punched through it and ripped out the mechanism. 

That might, Stiles thought, have been the truth. 

“In the auto-shop,” Stiles said, “The lights wouldn’t turn on, and the machinery wasn’t working. It didn’t look trashed, but I think the important parts had been removed. They could have emptied the car too.” 

Scott shook his head. “We looked inside the car, remember? You put your hand in all of the chewing gum in the dashboard.” 

Stiles grimaced, and then shook his head frantically. “No, I mean they could have emptied the inside of the car. We looked in the dash and under the seats, but we never looked under the bonnet. They could have taken anything, even the engine.” 

The very thought made him feel ill. The engine was the heart of a machine. 

“You have a point,” Derek said. He looked at the things in front of Stiles. “I’m assuming that’s why you picked all of that up?” 

“It just struck me funny,” Stiles said lightly, shrugging. “They were missing parts.” 

It was the truth, but it wasn’t everything. It wasn’t how he’d been able to tell, or why he’d done it. It was just a fact. 

Luckily, Derek seemed to buy it. 

“So, the question remains, then, what do they need all of those pieces for?” 

The air in the loft was tense, suddenly. They stayed quiet, hesitant to move or offer an opinion. Before, it had just been mostly harmless, a little confusing. Now, it was a mystery that needed solving. 

“I’d say it’s most likely that they’re building something,” Lydia said eventually. She wrapped her thin cardigan around her, shivering a little. “It depends on what they are.” 

“If they’re harmless creatures,” Scott offered, “then it’s possible that there’s a harmless reason behind the things they’ve stolen.” 

“And if they’re not,” Stiles countered. “Then we’re probably in a whole lot of danger, _again_.” 

*

Stiles spent the night at his desk, apologising to his increasingly tired computer for keeping her up. It wasn’t actually possible to tell whether the inanimate things he communicated with had a gender, but they definitely had a personality, no matter what they were. 

The microwave that Derek had recently bought, for instance, had the personality similar to that of an asshole jock that Stiles was unfortunately familiar with. 

His computer let out a longsuffering sigh. It wasn’t a visible sigh and it would not be audible to anyone else, but Stiles could see it and hear it and feel it. He stifled a grin, patted the screen, and logged off. He fished his phone out from under his bed and began to apologise as he collapsed on top of his sheets. His phone chattered sadly, obviously upset at being left in the dark under his bed. Things liked it best when they could fulfil their purpose, and lying next to a dirty sock and an old pizza box certainly wasn’t his phones purpose. 

It had been three days since the meet-up in the loft, three days since he had brought the box of echoes back to his house. He had taken to calling them echoes, memories of the lives that once inhabited the things. His belongings shuddered whenever he opened the lid, and the coffeepot had become increasingly more anxious as the days crept by. 

Stiles wanted to feel bad about that, but the memory of Dad’s face when old, cool coffee had sprayed all over his clean uniform had been worth it. He had no shame. 

He was finally dozing off when a text alert came through on his phone. His phone beeped cheerfully, trilling loudly in the silence. Stiles snatched it up quickly, peering at the screen. 

Cold fear washed over him, and the colour drained from his face. 

He kicked off his quilt and pulled some sneakers on, forgoing a shirt and pulling a hoodie on over his bare chest. His sweatpants were passably okay, and to be honest, Stiles could barely care right now. He pocketed his phone and his keys and then snuck quietly downstairs. He reached the door without a snag, his Dad still snoring soundly in his bed and stepped outside into the early hours of the morning. 

The drive to the edge of the preserve took less than ten minutes. 

He clambered out of the car and slammed the door shut. Scott was there, one hand clenched around the handle of his motorbike. He gave Stiles a worried look as he drew close. The others were there too, in various stages of their beta form. Danny was the only one who looked remotely human. 

“I’ve tracked their scent,” Derek said, his voice slightly muffled around his fangs. “They’re definitely in there, where the pond used to be. Be careful, there are other things in here, and whatever took them is probably waiting for us.” 

Stiles snorted. Allison was a trained hunter, Erica was a furious beta with control issues and Lydia was a piece of work when she wanted to be. Whatever had taken them had a lot more to fear than the werewolves that were coming after them. 

Stiles turned to Scott and thumped him reassuringly on the back. “Hey, buddy. This is Allison we’re talking about, and Lydia and Erica. If the things that took them aren’t in pieces   
by the time we get there, I will be thoroughly surprised.” 

Scott smiled weakly. He looked a little better. Privately, Stiles thought that it wasn’t going to be as simple as that, but he kept that thought to himself. 

“Let’s go,” Derek snarled, and they took off into the trees. 

Stiles tried desperately to keep up, but he wasn’t much of a match for five furious werewolves. Danny was there though, glancing back periodically to urge Stiles on. The others burst through the trees, roaring and smashing branches to the ground. The ground churned beneath their feet and Stiles slipped constantly. His shirt and jeans were smattered with mud, and he was severely out of breath by the time they skidded to a stop. Boyd crouched down, growling, and Jackson snarled. 

Derek held up a hand, and they subsided. 

Stiles tried to slow his breaths. Danny clapped a hand on his shoulder and tugged him forward. Scott had his head tilted to the side, obviously to listen for Allison’s heartbeat.

“Can you see them?” Jackson hissed. Derek made a warning noise, and Jackson mashed his hands into fists. Blood dripped down his knuckles, off of his fingers, and Stiles winced. 

“They’re in the clearing,” Isaac said quietly, peering over the overgrown shrubbery that spread in front of them. Isaac flicked a leaf off of his shoulder and gestured at the shrubbery. “Behind all of this.”

Everyone stilled. Now that they were quiet, Stiles could hear noises, like clinks of metal and steel, grinding noises, and soft gabbling. Whatever had taken Lydia and Allison and Erica, they didn’t speak English. 

“No point in waiting,” Derek said decisively. “Be careful, attack, and watch out for the others.” 

Stiles wanted to scream. Instead, he settled for an incredulous look as the werewolves howled simultaneously and launched themselves over the mess of undergrowth. Beside him, Danny threw up his hands and shared a look of disbelief with him. 

“Fucking werewolves,” Stiles hissed. “Of course we can’t have a plan, no, that would be too plebeian. Who needs well-thought out strategies when you can just dive head-first into danger.” He stomped angrily around the hedge, searching for an opening. 

He and Danny burst through the hedge eventually, arms scratched by the mangled mess of thorns. Stiles looked up, still panting slightly, and caught his breath at the view that awaited him. 

In front of them was a kind of clearing, a large oval dug down into the mud. Lydia, Allison and Erica were opposite them, across the clearing, attached to several trees with enormous amounts of rope. Erica was unconscious, but Lydia and Allison were struggling furiously in an attempt to get free. They both looked a mixture of pissed off and relieved to see them. 

That wasn’t what made Stiles catch his breath. He could hear a mass of whispering, ghost-like sounds that filled his ears and his lungs and every vessel in his body. Nobody else seemed affected. The clearing was strewn with odd bits of things, gleaming pieces of metal, gold and silver and copper, wires and cogs and gears and screws, all kinds of tools. Crawling through them were creatures. 

Danny dragged Stiles towards the group of werewolves, who were crouched together, snarling and glaring. Stiles moved to the back of the group, careful to remain out of sight from the creatures. 

And they were creatures. Stiles could see flesh, and bits of blood, and eyes, but he could also see limbs made entirely of metal that creaked and whirred. They weren’t natural, but they moved and hissed and gabbled out words, stomping down on the stuff in the clearings. The whispers became stronger, and Stiles tried to shake them away. 

Derek snarled, and every single monster froze. As one, each head turned slowly to gaze at the pack. Derek straightened up, and the others followed his lead. The creatures didn’t move. Scott rumbled uncertainly, a loud noise that rippled through the pack. Stiles stared at him in confusion, and then followed Scott’s gaze to where Isaac was creeping around the clearing, towards the trees where Lydia and Allison were. Boyd was shifting impatiently, obviously eager to get to Erica. 

“Here’s the deal,” Derek snarled. “You stay still, and we let you live.” 

Stiles raised one eyebrow. Danny was next to Jackson, rubbing his arm soothingly as the other boy snarled and jerked, restless and unnerved.   
Instead of the creatures responding, they remained where they were, eyes fixed on the pack. Nobody moved. Stiles was about to blurt out something stupid when suddenly, a voice echoed down from the trees, little more than a shriek. 

“ _You can have your thingssss back._ ” 

It was snakelike. It was a sound like ripping paper. It was a sound like waves roaring. It was inhuman and it sent a shudder down Stiles’ back. It was oddly familiar. 

“They aren’t things,” Jackson shouted, his voice tapering off into a roar.

Derek held up a hand to silence them all. “They are my pack. You may have thought them weak, but I assure you they are as strong as we. I want them back.” 

Isaac had untied Lydia, who rubbed her wrists and glared hatefully at the creatures, who were still as unmoving as marble. The voice hissed again. 

“ _I do not ssspeak of pack,_ ” the voice said laughingly. “ _Little animator. Life-maker. Bring ussss clossser. You may have your thingssss._ ” 

“What do you mean?” Scott shouted. “Who are you talking to?” 

Allison and Lydia skidded to a halt in front of them. Jackson gathered Lydia to him, one hand gripping hers tightly. Isaac was undoing the ropes around Erica, and Boyd seemed to grow more agitated by the second. 

Stiles was finding it increasingly hard to breathe. Realisation struck him, as he took in the sea of belongings that littered the clearing. Lamps and clocks and batteries and bits of computers, watches and phones and springs and circuit boards, game systems and cracked light bulbs. _Things_. 

They weren’t broken, Stiles realised. They weren’t scooped out, not like the box at home. The whispers, the ghost-like voices, they were the things, pleading and crying out for his help. Stiles felt sick, and he was absolutely certain that he was going to be sick, until Derek started to shout again. 

Isaac appeared in front of them, Erica folded delicately into his arms. Boyd scooped her up and began to whisper to her, but she didn’t move. 

Derek roared. “If you have hurt my beta, I will rip you apart!” 

As one, the pack began to snarl. As one, the metal monsters in front of them began to glow behind the eyes. Som of the eyes looked human, but some looked like they were made of glass, of metal. A hiss rose up, swallowing the voices of the technology strewn all across the floor. Stiles could barely keep the sick sadness at bay. Anger began to heat his blood, flowing through him. He breathed out harshly. 

The voice laughed. “ _Not your pack. My creaturesss. Bring them clossser, little life-maker. I will give you your thingsss._ ” 

Stiles steadied himself. The pack was not looking at him. Scott had his hands on Allison’s face, which was stormy and soft at the same time. Boyd and Isaac and Derek poured over Erica, and Danny stood with his arms around Jackson and Lydia. They were preoccupied. Stiles slid away, quietly, stepping around them and down into the clearing. He couldn’t ignore them any longer - the voices were so pained, in excruciating agony. 

He clenched his teeth as soft, triumphant laughter rained down from the sky. Stiles had no idea how the voice knew who he was, or what he could do. Stiles wasn’t even entirely sure that he knew what he was. Humans didn’t feel this pain, not from things that weren’t technically alive. 

The creatures though, they were almost alive. _Bring them closer_. Stiles sucked in a breath. The voice wanted him to give life to these monsters, bring them closer to real and alive and human. In exchange for the things they were cruelly torturing. Stiles didn’t even know if he could do that, but he was prepared to try. 

“Stiles,” Derek barked out from behind him, alarmed. “Stiles, don’t!” 

But it was too late. 

Stiles fastened his hand around the nearest monster’s wrist. It was barely a wrist. A bit of white bone peeked out from beneath the planes of metal and little wires. Stiles slammed his eyes shut. 

He was assaulted with information, so much so that it almost overloaded his brain. He gritted his teeth. He could feel the thing’s heart beating, and it must have been real, or at least modified because he had no control over it, could sense nothing. The limbs, though, and the rib bones and the brain, were all made out of metal and circuits. They were dead, though, no battery. 

It was a mess, but it was a complex one, one that, had it been done properly, would have created working mechanical creatures. Something dark had whispered to them, though, and they were part-person, part-machine, and part-monster. And the monster part, the metal and the circuits, they were the bits that needed life.   
Stiles stretched out with his senses. He could feel each creature, their essence humming in the ground beneath his feet. He could sense, amazingly, that if he gave life to one creature, the others would live too.

He hesitated. Pain was thrumming through him. It wasn’t his pain, it belonged to the things beneath his feet, but it was real enough to have him gasping for breath. 

“ _You sssssave them, or I will rip, every, single, thing on thissss planet apart and watch you die, ssslowly. And then I will sssstart on the people._ ” 

The voice broke through the darkness. Derek and Scott would reach him soon. He only needed a few seconds. 

Grappling within himself, Stiles found his spark, the little bit of life that he somehow shared with millions of other inanimate things, and he brought it out. A white-hot flash of pain flared down his arm, into his hand, and up into the creatures wrist. 

The metal monster made a keening sound, and then it hissed and wrenched its wrist away. Its limbs no longer lagged and dragged; it had control. Stiles opened his eyes blearily in time to see the mass of things crawl, spider-like out of the clearing. They disappeared over the ridge. 

He fell to his knees, amidst the oil and mud and broken whispers. The things keened too, small hiccups of sound. Stiles felt ill, and dizzy, and he desperately grabbed at the nearest things he could find, cradling them to his chest as he slumped forward in a dead faint, leaving the pack in stunned silence and the soft, hissing voice to laugh itself into silence.

*

He woke up somewhere warm, but uncomfortable. His feet were lolling off of whatever he was lying on, and there was a pillow jammed under his cheek. One of his arms was a dead weight, and he had cramp in his toe. Someone had thoughtfully taken off his shoes. 

There were whispers running up and down his arm, and he frowned, eyes still closed, as he realised that he was clutching something hard and tinny in his hands. It was in pain. He opened his eyes immediately and glanced down at the beat-up mechanical toy in his hand. He made a soft shushing sound, soothing it with small comforting words and rubbing his fingers through the dirt that caked it. A bit of information flitted through his mind as the toy calmed down; the mainspring was damaged. 

“I can fix that,” Stiles said reassuringly around a yawn. The toy hummed happily. 

“Fix what?” 

Stiles jumped violently, shooting upright. He blinked around hazily until Derek’s loft came into view. He was sprawled on the couch, and around him, the pack was settled into various spaces on the floor and several chairs had been dragged over. 

“What?” Stiles said. It was less of a question and more of a demand for an explanation. He sat up properly, a little awkwardly, and stared around at the pack with increasing uneasiness. They all looked a bit blank, a bit unsettled.

“ _What?_ ” Stiles demanded. 

Derek appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. He looked relieved to see Stiles awake, which stumped him, and then his face hardened. “I think we should be asking you that.” 

“I don’t…” Stiles trailed off, mouth popping open as his memories flooded back to him. He groaned and buried his head in his hands, swearing quietly under his breath. The toy ticked comfortingly next to his ear. 

“Stiles, man,” Scott said quietly. “What’s going on?” 

Stiles looked up. Scott sounded worried, and a little bit hurt. Stiles winced. 

He had always been afraid of this. His power, or his ability, whatever it was, had manifested young. Even a five-year old Stiles knew he was plenty different already, and although his Mum had encouraged him, _always_ , to be himself, he had known that this wasn’t something to be shared. Other people, normal people, they didn’t hear their belongings whispering to them when they were hurt or upset. Other people had never held a broken music box in their hands and watched the springs unwind and the cogs unclog. 

“It’s not like it seems,” Stiles said hoarsely. He didn’t take his eyes off of Scott, who was frowning intensely. 

“Then what is it?” Isaac interrupted. He was on the other couch, beside Allison and Scott. Allison looked fine, as did Lydia, who was sat on Jackson’s lip. They were both staring at him as if he was something out of a science experiment. Except for Jackson, of course. Jackson was sneering. 

“That thing, that voice,” Lydia said slowly. “It was talking about you. It called you a life-maker. An animator. What did it mean?” 

Stiles blinked, and then shrugged. “I don’t know.” 

Boyd scoffed. Stiles glanced up, surprised. He hadn’t noticed the boy, who was kneeling in the corner, Erica curled up beside him. She looked pale and a little ill. 

“Spill it, batman,” she murmured, as they locked gazes. 

Stiles didn’t know how to spill it. He could feel all his memories, trying to keep it secret, all of them bubbling up like lava. His pack were looking mistrustful, his friends were doubting him. 

“Have you thought about whether or not it’s really real?” Lydia said quietly, breaking the silence. “I’m assuming you were talking to the toy when you promised to fix it. Some people with schizophrenia or psychosis hear voices from technology.”

Stiles gaped at her. Then he glanced around. The only person missing was Danny, but Stiles knew the other boy would probably have had the same, doubtful look on his face. Danny had always thought Stiles was insane. 

“Is that what you think?” he snapped. “Is that what you all think? That I’m crazy, I’ve gone insane, hearing things inside the fucking oven. Is that right?” 

“That’s not what I meant,” Lydia said snippily, but there was a small blush highlighting his cheeks. 

Stiles stood up and glared at Lydia. “That’s exactly what you meant. For someone who’s been accused of being crazy herself, you’d think you’d be a little more careful throwing that word around.” 

Lydia set her jaw, and Jackson snarled, standing up. Lydia tipped off of his lap and onto the floor with a small noise of surprise. 

“Shut the fuck up, Stilinski,” Jackson said, moving closer. Stiles drew himself up. He was only an inch shorter than Jackson, and he didn’t feel it now. 

“No,” Stiles ground out, practically spitting. “I won’t. I’m sick of being told to shut up by you. You’re a werewolf, a supernatural creature of the night that grows fur and goes on a rampage when you get pissed off. You used to be a damn lizard, but _Techno-path_ is hard for you to swallow. _Techno-path_ is crazy.” 

Suddenly, Derek was there, pushing them both apart. He levelled Jackson with a warning look, a dark one that had Jackson gnashing his teeth as he subsided, mutinous. 

“Is that what you are?” Derek said quietly, firmly. His hand was still resting on Stiles’ chest, palm pressed against his shirt, and he had a look in his eyes that Stiles didn’t like. It almost looked like pity. 

“A techno-path?” Stiles demanded, although his anger was beginning to fade somewhat. “I don’t know.” 

“Why don’t you explain it then?” Derek suggested calmly. “Without any accusations from anybody, without any more arguments from you.” 

Stiles rubbed a hand across his face. Scott was still in a state of confusion and hurt, but a little bit of reassurance shone through when Stiles glanced at him. Allison gave him a warm smile, and even Isaac nodded. 

“It’s easier to show you,” Stiles said eventually. He had no idea where it came from, but suddenly he was pushing out with his hands and his senses, purely on instinct, enveloping them all in his memories. 

*

Maybe it was an invasion of privacy, of their minds, but it was a soft one. It was a tug that gently suggested that they should watch these, listen to them. 

_Stiles is four, sat at the kitchen table. A woman with a beautiful face and long hair dances about behind him, humming as she dusts. Stiles smiles, sticks his tongue out as he concentrates on his picture. He’s drawn them all, mummy and daddy and Stiles in the middle, and the dog that he wants but that daddy says is too much money for the moment, but maybe later Stiles, when you’re bigger._

_For a minute, the picture is so real to Stiles that he feels it, warm in his chest and he pushes that feeling down into the pencil, out of his fingertips.  
The colours are everywhere, all over the page, and swirling and beautiful and then they aren’t on the page anymore. They rise up from the page, pencil outlines peeling themselves away as they dance, on the table top, in time with the woman’s voice._

_Stiles lets out a peal of laughter, and the woman turns, a glass bowl in her hand. She drops it, a surprised scream spilling out of her throat and Stiles turns, grinning, as the pencil people drop down and the memory fades._

_Stiles is six, in a sandpit, waiting for mummy to stop talking to the other lady so that they can go and get ice cream. And then there’s a boy there, a boy with a lopsided smile and lots of hair and he’s holding up a bucket covered in pictures of dinosaurs._

_Stiles eyes the bucket, because his bucket only has cars on it and everybody knows that dinosaurs are much better than cars. He tells the boy that, and the boy narrows his eyes._

_Stiles knows this is going to end in a sand-fight, and sure enough, sand flies thick and true, enveloping both boys in a blizzard of sand so intense that mummy and the other lady lose sight of them._

_They run over, screaming, and Stiles is grinning, grinning because the boy is spitting out sand, and there’s a sand dinosaur about to chomp down on the boy’s leg, and then mummy is there and stiles is waving his hands at the dinosaur, shooing him away as the blizzard dies down, along with the memory._

_Stiles is eight, in his room. He doesn’t move. Mummy is dead and daddy is sad and he can’t make his mind stay still, not even when the rest of him is still. His toys are all over the floor, everywhere, spilling out of their boxes and crashing into the walls, cars racing along the ceiling, action men fighting furiously._

_He’s holding mummy’s jumper in his hands and it smells of her and softness and lavender and he cries, he cries a lot, because daddy wasn’t there at the end and he isn’t here now, he’s buried in a bottle and he cries because mummy is gone._

_He glares at the toys and yells, long and loud and angry, because why should they move when mummy can’t, why can he make things move when all he wants is his mummy, this isn’t what he wants, this isn’t what he wants._

_Stiles is fourteen when he microwaves a meal and listens, really listens past the beep and the tone that the microwave makes. It sounds sad and when he puts a hand on the door, and he can see why. It’s all there, in his head, big bright information, lots of letters and wires and numbers and springs._

_He cleans it and pushes his light into it, the warm light in his chest that used to make things real before Stiles stopped caring about making things real. But he cares now, because the microwave is sad and it needs to stop._

_He’s had enough sadness to last him a lifetime, and this house needs to be happy before it becomes a home again._

_Stiles is fifteen, sprawled on his bed, sleeping peacefully when his alarm clock bursts into song. Still asleep, Stiles puts out his hand and the alarm clock shuts up, frowning sulkily.  
Stiles banishes it to the wardrobe the next day, when it imitates a fire engine a four in the morning. _

_The projector at school bristles indignantly as Harris yells at Stiles, and Stiles grins into his hand when the projector explodes in a shower of sparks. It’s not broken, and it doesn’t cause any harm, it’s all for show, but Harris leaps back like his ass is on fire, and that’s enough._

_He’s at the beach with Melissa and Scott and the sand buzzes a little under his toes but it doesn’t move, doesn’t shape itself into anything but footprints when Stiles walks across it. He doesn’t know why, but he can’t reach it, and it makes him sad but it also makes hum curious, and curiosity is his besetting sin._

_His phone drowns in the pool as he holds up Derek and he listens to it choke and splutter and die and clings to the werewolf, and he hates the kanima and he hates Scott for not saving them, and his arms ache and his lungs hurt and they aren’t going to make it, just like his phone, they aren’t, they aren’t, they aren’t-_

_He soothes the coffeepot and cleans the cooker, listens to it laugh at his jokes and he pleads with his computer and rescues a phone from down the back of a bus seat and runs a hand down the lamps to keep them awake and pats the television before he goes to bed and winds up all of the toys in the library book corner with a twist of his hand and there are so many things, so many things that he does, so many things that he saves._

_He’s sixteen and Roscoe is there, a big blue monster of a machine with a happy growl and a beautiful roar and Stiles can smell lavender on the seats and Roscoe purrs under his touch and blinks it’s headlights at Derek’s Camaro when they pass it and screams when a flash of blonde pulls out the carburettor. Stiles will fix it, Roscoe says, Stiles always fixes it, we never leave a man behind._

_Roscoe slams into a monster, a big sad one with shining teeth and a panicked mind and the car nudges Stiles out because always, always, always, it keeps Stiles safe._

*

The pack gasped and groaned as the memories faded. Stiles had no idea what they might have seen- he lost control of his memories as soon as he pushed them onto the pack. Lydia looked pale and guilty, and Scott had a look of awe on his face. Jackson made a sick noise in his throat, very green around the gills. 

Stiles winced. Jackson must have seen a few kanima-related memories in there then. 

“Do you guys believe me yet?” Stiles asked, crossing his fingers. Allison had one hand over her mouth. 

“You really feel all of that,” Isaac said slowly. His eyes were kind of wide and blown, as if he couldn’t believe what he had seen. 

“That’s,” Scott started, “that’s amazing. I mean, it’s weird, but it’s amazing. I can’t believe I didn’t remember that sand thing. I thought I was just making it up.” 

Stiles shook his head, smiling tentatively. “You saw the dinosaur? No, you weren’t making it up, although I don’t think I can do that anymore. I think it was a bit different when I was younger. I don’t know what happened, really.” 

He did know what had happened. His Mum had died. He watched the pack shift uncomfortably and realised that they might know too. 

There was quiet for a while, and then Jackson sat up, face clouding with suspicion. “Are you the one behind Derek’s microwave burning my food every time I use it?”

Stiles sniggered into his hand. There was a ripple of laughter across the group as Jackson sat back, fuming and promising to knock Stiles’ head in one day. The only one who didn’t laugh was Derek. 

Stiles watched the alpha out of the corner of his eye. Derek looked stricken, almost. Stiles wondered what he’d seen that could make him look like that. The swimming pool, possibly. 

“Stiles,” Erica said suddenly, her voice hoarse from disuse. “I’m sorry about your car. Derek told me to stop you, and I was hyped up on power. I didn’t mean to knock you out like that, and I guess I didn’t even think about the Jeep.” 

Stiles shrugged. “You didn’t know. Although we would both prefer it of you kept your hands to yourself from now on. Roscoe’s kind of been looking for an excuse to run over anything blonde these days.” 

“It did run over Jackson,” Isaac pointed out, to another round of laughter. 

“Point taken,” Stiles said, grinning. He could tell, looking at them, that they didn’t quite understand what it was that he could do. He could tell by Lydia’s curious gaze that she had a million questions for him, and probably a few experiments in mind, too. He could tell by Derek’s sick look that he would need to talk to the older man, reassure him that a phone does not equal Derek’s life. He could tell a lot of things, just looking at them. 

He could also tell that they believed him, and that they didn’t think any less of him because of his talent. They didn’t think he was insane. 

It was perhaps the most relieved Stiles had felt in a long, long time. 

*

It came to a head, as things were wont to do, in an abandoned warehouse. Stiles had never understood the sheer amount of abandoned warehouses that seemed to pop up all over Beacon Hills, already disused and rusty and worn down. At least, he thought to himself, they were far enough away from civilisation that it was unlikely that anyone outside of the pack was going to get hurt. 

Stiles was. Stiles was going to get hurt, because Stiles is an idiot. 

It happened like this: The things are everywhere, pint-sized shapes that scream and whir and snap their long metal fingers threateningly. They look like ragged tangles of silver and iron, cogs coming loose from their spaces, springs dangling from their sockets. One of them throws Isaac at a wall, despite being seven times as smaller than him. Another cleaves one of Allison’s arrows clean in half. Derek and Scott rip one in half, spilling oil onto the floor. 

There aren’t many left, and Stiles is doing an excellent job of smashing the things away with his bat, when a large, misshapen figure appears from the shadows of the warehouse. 

The things stop fighting immediately, bowing down and scrambling backwards away from the pack. There’s one monster with its teeth fixed around Stiles’ bat and it crunches down before it backs away, leaving Stiles with two, slightly smaller bats instead. 

He stares at them in dismay, and then throws them aside. 

The figure is bigger than all of the other things. It’s taller, a little more humanoid in shape. It turns its head, slowly, with a sick grinding noise that sends shudders down Stiles’ spine. As its head moves, the hood falls down. Stiles stares in horror, bile rising in his throat, at the mess of flesh and metal beneath it. It seems to be part person, part machine, but the line between the two has been so roughly sewn that Stiles can’t see it. One of its eyes is missing.

“ _I breathe,_ ” it hisses, sharp bits of metal gnashing together, makeshift teeth. Its voice is a rasp. “ _I thiiink._ ” 

Stiles holds his breath. There is a metallic scent in the air. It’s the same voice from the forest, the disembodied one. 

Jackson throws himself forward, snarling, but the figure catches him mid-leap with a sweep of its arm, which is lined with razor sharp steel. Blood drips down its face as it watches   
Jackson crash into the wall and fall to the floor, where he lies still. Lydia screams, hands tightening on her flamethrower, and Derek and Scott begin to snarl. 

“Don’t attack,” Derek yells, the growl obvious in his voice. “Stand firm, make a half-circle.” 

“ _I breathe,_ ” it says again, just as Stiles is about to join the rest of the scrambling pack. Then he catches something in the thing’s tone. Menace, definitely, but also awe. Relief. Surprise. A niggling thought nudges at the back of his brain, but Stiles ignores it. 

The pack has made a rough semi-circle, and Stiles peels himself away from the floor-length wall of windows that he’s been leaning on. He starts forward and then makes a noise of horror. 

More things are crawling down from the ceiling, moving swiftly and spider-like down the walls, from the beams and rafters. Clockwork monsters casting their net, zeroing in on their prey. There are dozens, Stiles realises, feeling sick. He backs away again and shouts a warning, just as a thing launches itself at Scott’s back, wrapping its sharp arms around his neck. 

A deadly fight breaks out. 

Jackson coughs from nearby and Stiles realises his feet have carried him towards the other werewolf. 

“There are too many,” Stiles mutters, leaning down to pull Jackson to his feet. Normally he’d be in the middle of the fight, but his bat lies broken in half. 

“Do something,” Jackson snarls, spitting blood onto the floor. He’s watching Lydia, who’s white as a sheet but still standing, aiming her flamethrower at the nearest monsters. Their faces melt under her fire, molten and orange, burning and dying. 

“I don’t know what to do,” Stiles says helplessly. He hates feeling helpless, despises it.

“Stilinski,” Jackson snaps. “You’re the one with the freaky power. Man the fuck up and do something with it.” 

Then Jackson throws himself back into the throng. 

Stiles is frozen but his mind whirrs ahead. Jackson is right. Stiles casts about. He can feel the dark, seething energy of the clockwork creatures. They are metal monstrosities, but they don’t have a mind of their own. The big one is waiting, calmly and serenely, hissing with soft laughter. 

Stiles has no control of the little monsters, but the big one, he thinks, the big one he might be able to take. 

He can feel energy under his feet. The little ones are attacking mindlessly, their focus drawn again to Allison’s arrows and Derek’s roar and Isaac’s claws and Scott’s fangs. 

Stiles lets his gaze fall on the big one again. 

“He’s in charge,” Stiles murmurs. “It’s like a hive.” 

A hive of workers, of warriors under the thumb of one queen, who watches the fight raging with one blank, steel eye. 

If the Queen falls, they all fall. 

“I wish you had been boxtrolls, or something,” Stiles says with a sigh. He can feel a different kind of energy now and he knows what it is, reaches out to harness it.

His back is to the windows. 

In the parking lot, there are three cars, a motorbike and an old, rusted Jeep. Stiles takes a deep breath and pleads, coaxes, mutters urgently.

He has to stay right where he is for this to work, the way the big guy has to stay right where he is for his monsters to work. They are both at the centre of their own hives. 

One by one, the headlights come on, bathing the warehouse in light as the cars begin to roar with life. The motorbike wobbles unsteadily, but Stiles urges it on. 

“Move left!” he screams at his pack, just as tons of metal and steel and force smash through the floor length windows, heading straight for the big guy. 

Stiles doesn’t see the pack dive out of the way as one, sprinting into the shadows and the corners of the room. He doesn’t hear the screech of metal mouths as the cars collide with the big guy, splintering him into a thousand pieces. He doesn’t see the way that the creatures drop like flies, all of them, crashing lifelessly to the ground in puddles of cogs and springs. 

He doesn’t see it, because he has to stay where he is, and where he is happens to be right in the path of an old, rusted Jeep, a Jeep that he loves. He hears it roar, feels a painful, excruciating weight against his back, and then he’s gone.


	2. clockwork

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I thought it was simply a light, at first,” Deaton said, walking towards a locked cabinet. “However, it bears remarkable resemblance to a capsule that I have used myself, several times. The light that you can see comes from within the capsule, which is an undetectable casing used to hold incredibly fragile, powerful substances. This light is perhaps one of the most powerful substances in the world.” 
> 
> “Coffee?” Stiles suggested.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, I am extremely sorry! This was meant to be up months ago, and I had to extend it so that there's one more chapter. I promise it will be the last chapter though, and it won't take as long to get it up here :) Sorry again!  
> Secondly, thanks for all the response! Such lovely comments and kudos :)  
> Thirdly, I hope you enjoy this part as much as the last part! It starts off just a few minutes after the last chapter ended. Thank you so much!

“What did he do?” 

“He should have woken up by now, shouldn’t he? Why the fuck didn’t we take him to the hospital?”

“I’m pretty sure his arm shouldn’t look like that.” 

“Oh _really?_ What gave it away?” 

“The twisted elbow, mostly.” 

“Shut up,” Stiles groaned. His voice was low and slurred. “All of you.” 

“Oh thank God,” Scott’s voice said. A sigh of relief filled the room. Stiles groaned again. He couldn’t feel any pain in his arm, which was weird, but when he focused, he realised that he couldn’t feel anything at all. Werewolf healing powers were incredible. Stiles would make sure that he remembered to thank God for them when he got to the pearly white gates. 

“Can’t feel my arm,” he mumbled, just in case it wasn’t to do with werewolf healing powers and his arm was actually still in a dark corner of the warehouse. 

He could hear the smirk in Erica’s voice. “That’s because Derek is holding your hand.” 

Stiles stopped moving. Cautiously, he wriggled his fingers. Pain flared in his wrist, but more importantly, someone’s hand was indeed wrapped around his own. Warmth flooded his cheeks. 

“Don’t move your arm.” Derek sounded rough, like he was in pain. Stiles listened groggily as he began to order everyone around, kind but firm as he insisted that they get back to their homes and clean up. Scott brushed a hand over Stiles’ shoulder and promised to cover for him with his Dad before he left the room. Lydia informed him that he was to get better immediately, or there would be consequences. Stiles grinned, but didn’t bother opening his eyes. He was too exhausted. 

A few hours later, he woke up. Groaning, Stiles rubbed at his eyes with the heel of his palm, wiping away the sleep. He was sprawled awkwardly on the couch, feet propped up on something warm and soft. 

“Good morning.” 

_“Fuck!”_

Stiles stared at the ceiling with a wide-eyed expression, waiting for his heart to calm down. He craned his neck to glare at Derek, but Derek didn’t respond. He was staring avidly at a book. Stiles watched, strangely mesmerised, as Derek flipped a page with his thumb. His tight, blood-stained top had been replaced by another sweater. This one was the soft colour of moss and hung a little loosely around his collarbone. 

Stiles shifted as he attempted to sit up, and blinked in confusion when he realised that his feet were propped up on Derek’s lap. 

His feet. Were in Derek’s lap. 

Derek wasn’t looking at him, so he didn’t see the way that Stiles flushed bright red. Oddly embarrassed, Stiles forced his gaze away from Derek’s face and looked at his arm instead. 

The cast caught his eye first. It ran from his elbow to his wrist, just jutting out over his thumb. It was also shockingly pink. Stiles stared at it in dismay. It was going to be impossible to hide. Stiles sighed through his nose and tentatively shifted his arm, checking for pain, when he made another startling discovery. 

Derek had one hand loosely wrapped around Stiles’ injured one. 

“Scott picked the colour,” Derek said, still looking at his book. 

Stiles sighed loudly. “Of course he did. Asshole.”

“Deaton was here. You slept through everything, even setting the bone. He gave you some sort of potion that made sure you wouldn’t wake up, but apparently there wasn’t much chance of that anyway.” 

Stiles cracked his jaw. “Why not?” He felt a little jittery. Derek’s hand was warm, his skin a little rough against Stiles’ palm. Stiles couldn’t quite bring himself to pull his arm away. 

“Apparently, you exhausted yourself when you controlled those cars,” Derek said. He put the book down on the arm of the couch and turned to look at him. “Your ability took a lot out of you.” 

“I’ve never done something like that before,” Stiles said. He distantly recalled the pull in his gut, the strange pressure that had built behind his skull before the car had crashed into him. 

The Jeep had swerved at the last minute, just catching him in the side and flinging him across the floor. The other cars had stayed on course, ripping through the monsters with a roar of metal crashing against metal. Roscoe hadn’t been able to do that. 

“You fainted when you brought those creatures to life,” Derek pointed out, brow furrowing as he thought back to the incident. 

“Passed out,” Stiles said insistently, waving his good hand. “Passed out sounds manlier than fainted. Bringing the creatures to life wasn’t the same as controlling the cars. And I’d never done that before either.” 

“What do you think the difference was?” 

Stiles thought for a moment, but he already knew the answer, deep down. He was just reluctant to say it. “Free will,” Stiles said quietly, after a pause in which Derek just waited, calm. “The monsters wanted the life I was offering them. They wanted to be real, and they believed that I could do it. Belief makes all the difference. The cars, though. That was different.”

“Different how?” Derek asked softly.

Stiles sighed. “I told you all before, that objects have their own version of being alive. Cars have a lot of life, or a lot of potential for life. They have character, like Roscoe. I didn’t ask them to drive, I didn’t offer them the choice, like I did with the monsters. I just forced them to do it. I gave the monsters life, but I took something away from the cars.” 

He felt sick to his soul.

“The cars are the same as the phones and the computers, right? You can communicate with them well enough.” 

“Yeah, sort of,” Stiles said, tilting his head to the side. “It’s like they have their own language, and I can tap into it. Not properly, but well enough.” 

“You’re not fluent in it,” Derek offered, thoughtful. “It’s like with sign language. You might know a few words, but just because you don’t understand the language completely doesn’t mean you can’t understand the person, or what they mean.”

Stiles blinked at him, before a bemused smile spread across his face. “Yeah,” Stiles said, nodding enthusiastically. “That’s it exactly, actually.” 

“I know, it’s amazing,” Derek said dryly, rolling his eyes. “I actually have a brain.” 

Stiles stared at him, wide-eyed. “No! That’s not it. I forget how smart you are sometimes. I think it’s just because you’re quiet. I’m used to loud people and school, and teachers that think any second where they’re not rubbing how smart they are in our faces is a second wasted. You’re a different kind of smart. You know, like the kid who sits in the back of the class and reads Shakespeare under the desk. The one who says fuck all in class and then gets full marks in every test.” 

Derek blinked at him. A soft, wry smile pulled at the corner of his mouth. “Thanks. I _think_.”

It was perhaps the most bizarre, roundabout compliment that Stiles could have paid him, and he realised it only after all the words had escaped his mouth. It was true, all of it, but a lot of things about Derek were true, and Stiles had never announced them to him before. It was true that Derek was possibly one of the most attractive people that Stiles had ever had the misfortune of pissing off before. It was true that Derek’s eyebrows completely disappeared when he shifted into his beta form. It was true that Derek was a therapist’s wet dream, that he liked strawberry juice and had a surprising sweet tooth, and that his hair stuck up in a ridiculous peak in the morning – a truth that Stiles had accidentally stumbled upon one morning when he burst through Derek’s door rambling about pixies and caught Derek unawares. 

Another truth was that Derek looked sort of adorable when he was caught unawares, especially that early in the morning. 

Stiles shook himself out of his thoughts, and found that Derek was staring at him. “What?” he blurted out, shifting on the couch. His feet were still in Derek’s lap, something to marvel at. There was a hole in one of his socks and Stiles looked at that, rather than Derek. 

“Nothing,” said Derek, eventually. “C’mon, I’ll drive you home.” 

They held hands all the way to the car, and when Derek let go to open the door, Stiles’ hand felt cold and empty.

*

“He was holding my hand, Scott,” Stiles implored, shaking his hand in Scott’s face. “This one, right here. _Ow_.”

Scott made an exasperated sound and carefully pushed at his cast. “Don’t do that. You’ll end up breaking something else, like my face, or all of your fingers. Look, it’s not a big deal, right?” 

Stiles gaped at him. “Scott, this is Derek Hale we’re talking about. And he was all soft and squishy and he held my hand without crushing it beneath his many muscles.” 

Scott raised an eyebrow, a hint of a smirk visible on his face. Stiles narrowed his eyes at him. “Don’t say anything,” Stiles muttered, kicking petulantly at a bit of stone. They were in the warehouse, surrounded by rubble and the remains of one of the cars, which had crashed into the opposite wall rather than skidding to a stop like the others. Stiles was lucky that Lydia was rich and had been eyeing up a newer, pinker car for a while now, otherwise he’d be cannon fodder. 

“Look, dude, I don’t know what to tell you. So Derek held your hand for a bit, it makes sense,” Scott said, shrugging. “It’s not like you both went to eighth base with each other. He had to drain the pain somehow. You took a pretty big hit, man, even if it wasn’t the one you intended to take.” 

Stiles rubbed his wrist. He had suffered worse injuries than a broken arm, but the cast was more irritating than painful. It itched and his skin felt raw underneath. “I’m not going to apologise for that,” Stiles muttered. “You guys were getting slaughtered out here, I had to do something. It just so happened that the something involved big, heavy vehicles.” 

Scott shot him a look. They were tucked away in the corner of the warehouse, but Stiles recognised the tilt to Isaac’s head that said he was listening carefully whilst pretending to examine one of the pipes that had come loose during the fight. Stiles glared at the back of Isaac’s neck until Scott distracted him with a hand to his shoulder. 

“Hey, I know you did what you had to do,” Scott said softly. “And believe me dude, I’m grateful for it. We all are. But you hit yourself with a car, Stiles. You effectively ran yourself over, you might as well have jumped in front of it.” 

“I didn’t jump in front of it,” Stiles scoffed, but Scott cut over him. 

“But you didn’t jump out of the way of it, either,” Scott said insistently. “You could have moved, but I saw you. You just stood there, like you were waiting for it to hit you.” 

“It wasn’t like that,” Stiles said, shaking his head. “I promise, it was just the only way that I had any control over what I was doing. This ability, magic, power, whatever the fuck it is, doesn’t come with a manual. And it’s not easy for me to control cars – giant amounts of metal and engine, that don’t want to be controlled. I just tried to stay as still as possible and communicate with them, that’s all, I swear.” 

Scott nodded, clapped a hand on Stiles’ back. “I believe you. You really don’t know anything about what you can do, do you?” 

Stiles shrugged. “Not a clue. I have this sinking feeling that Batman’s rise to power was a little more elegant than mine.” 

“Yeah,” Scott agreed, mouth twitching. “I don’t think Batman ever broke his arm trying to be a badass hero.”

“What do you mean, ‘trying’?”

“If you two lovebirds have finished affirming your vows,” Isaac drawled, “I think I’ve found something.” He beckoned them over and pointed down at his boot. Stiles sighed as Scott dragged him towards Isaac, who straightened up instantly as Scott approached. Jackson let Lydia tug him over to their little group, and Allison dropped the cardboard box she had been holding in order to join them. The others were at Deaton’s with the first load of boxes, which was why Stiles had deemed it safe to talk to his best bud about Derek. 

Not that Scott had been particularly helpful, _at all_. 

“What are we supposed to be looking at?” Lydia asked. She had her arms crossed and looked generally unimpressed at having to dig through a dank, dirty warehouse, despite the fact that she had been thrown to the floor in the exact same warehouse only days prior. “All I see is more disgusting things that we have to clean up.” 

“I’d rather clean it up than have it come back to life in a day or two,” Allison said soothingly, linking hands with Lydia. “Mess before death, don’t you think?” 

“It’s right there,” Isaac said impatiently. 

They looked down. There were a few coils of metal, and beneath them, something was glowing. It looked like candlelight, soft and orange, but as they all gathered around Isaac, the glow began to grow brighter. 

“Congratulations, Lahey,” Jackson sneered. “You’ve found a light. Impressive.” 

Isaac sighed shortly through his nose. 

“As usual, Jackson, your powers of observation are startling,” Stiles said, rolling his eyes. Scott knelt down next to the light and shifted a few bits of metal out of the way. He wrapped his hand in the hem of his t-shirt and carefully picked up the light. 

“Careful,” Allison warned him, hand twitching like she wanted to reach out for him. Scott gave her a dopey smile and stood up, holding the light out for them to see. 

Something snapped inside Stiles’ chest at the exact moment that the light began to burn through Scott’s shirt. Scott yelped and drew his hand back, patting frantically at his shirt, where the light had eaten through the material like acid. The light hung in front of them all, suspended in the air for a fraction of a second before gravity gripped it hard and it began to fall. 

Stiles snatched it out of the air. 

The light flared brightly. Scott reached out as if to smack it out of Stiles’ hand, but Stiles cupped it closer to him, out of reach, shooting Scott a dirty look. Scott gaped at him. 

Lydia’s eyes narrowed. “It isn’t burning you. Does it hurt at all?”

“Of course not,” Stiles said softly, although he couldn’t tell why he said it. There was just something about the feel of it in his hand, the welcoming glow that emanated from deep in the light. 

“Why not?” Allison asked, staring at Stiles’ hand cautiously. “Why isn’t it burning you if it hurt Scott?” Her mistrust of anything supernatural ran deep, and if Stiles felt in his right mind, he would have been right there with her. But nothing felt sensible with this little light in his hands. 

Stiles shrugged. “I don’t know. It just won’t burn me. It would never burn me.”

“What’s going on?” Derek opened the warehouse door and let it clang shut behind him. They jumped, all of them, apart from Stiles. He was too busy holding the light close. It reminded him of something, strongly, but he couldn’t think of what it was. 

“Stiles found something,” Scott said quietly, glancing from Stiles to Derek. “I think we should go to Deaton’s. _Now_.” 

*

Deaton peered closely at the light. It was still pulsing softly, orange light shading Stiles’ fingers. He had refused to let go of it, even for a second, but he did hold it out so that the others could examine it. It was shaped like a fat bullet, and it didn’t feel like anything that Stiles had ever come across before. He couldn’t tell if it had texture, or substance, or if it was just light. All he knew was that it was familiar. 

Deaton put down his enlarging glass and stared cautiously at Stiles. He looked troubled, which would have troubled Stiles in turn, had he been looking. And _that_ troubled everyone else, because if there was one thing they all knew about Stiles, it was that he loved a good mystery, something to solve, and his insatiable curiosity would have had him bugging Deaton for books and potions right now. 

“What is it?” Derek asked, a little impatient. “Have you seen one before?” 

“I have seen something like it before,” Deaton confirmed. “Although, not in my time and certainly not in real life. In fact, I doubt that anyone has seen one of these in real life in a very long time. A very, very long time.” 

“It burned me when I picked it up,” Scott explained, showing Deaton the burnt part of his t-shirt. His hand had healed within seconds, but his shirt was scorched through. 

Deaton narrowed his eyes. “Are you absolutely sure that it burned?” 

Scott shared a confused look with everyone. Allison stepped forward. “Why is that surprising?” she asked, crossing her arms. “It looks hot, like fire. And it did that to his t-shirt. What else could it have been?” 

Deaton tipped his head to the side, still staring at Scott. Stiles looked up from the light in time to see an uncertain expression cross Scott’s face. 

“It might have felt like something else,” Scott said, thinking hard. “It felt, almost … draining. Like it was sucking the energy out of my arm. I think that’s why I let go, and that’s when I noticed my shirt.” 

“Should Stiles be holding it?” Derek asked immediately, shoulders tensing. He glanced anxiously at the light, and Stiles brought it closer to his chest, holding it tight. He didn’t want to let it go. 

Deaton nodded once, firmly. “Yes. I believe it to be safe. In fact, Mr Stilinski is probably the only person on this earth who can hold that capsule without dying eventually.” 

Stiles looked at him. “A capsule?” He blinked in surprise. His voice was low and rough, like he’d been screaming or shouting for a long time. He ignored everyone’s gazes, well aware that he was unnerving them. He couldn’t help it though.

“I thought it was simply a light, at first,” Deaton said, walking towards a locked cabinet. “However, it bears remarkable resemblance to a capsule that I have used myself, several times. The light that you can see comes from within the capsule, which is an undetectable casing used to hold incredibly fragile, powerful substances. This light is perhaps one of the most powerful substances in the world.” 

“Coffee?” Stiles suggested. 

A snigger ran around the room. Derek coughed into his sleeve, which Stiles recognised as Derek’s signature ‘trying not to laugh’ move. It never failed to surprise him a little that he could make Derek, of all people, laugh. 

Deaton looked at him steadily. “Life, Stiles. Life at its’ most basic form.” 

“So, essentially coffee, then,” Stiles muttered. 

“Life and belief,” Deaton continued, as if Stiles hadn’t spoken. “A spark of pure life, mixed with powerful belief that the life will take hold and live.” 

Stiles went still. “It came from one of those clockwork bastards, didn’t it? It’s what kept it alive.” 

Deaton nodded. “Essentially, yes, but it came from you first. You have a spark, Stiles. The spark, at its’ very centre, is life. And your belief is what allows you to push that life onto other objects that would otherwise remain inanimate. It is what gives you your unusual little gift of communicating with technology. You believe them to be capable of having feelings, thoughts, character – all the things that make them seem alive, and so they are alive, because you wish them to be.” 

Stiles didn’t know what to say. His mind was reeling. Right here was an answer to his very first puzzle, the mystery that had plagued him since he had twisted shapes out of sand and brought pictures to life with just a childish thought. Belief, and a spark of life. That was what made his phone hiss at him in the middle of the life, when Stiles accidentally knocked it off of his bed. That was what had given the coffee pot its’ temperamental state, what had made the microwave hate Jackson. 

“If I stopped believing,” Stiles said quietly, clutching the light close to him. “They would all die, wouldn’t they?” 

Deaton smiled sympathetically. “They were never really alive to begin with.”

*

Stiles rifled through the box slowly, hindered by his bad arm. It stung occasionally, and the skin beneath the cast itched irritatingly, but the most irritating, _distracting_ thing about it by far was that every time Stiles looked at it he was reminded of Derek’s hand in his own, fingers laced together like that was what they were built for. 

Derek had certainly mellowed out recently, whilst simultaneously managing to be the most paranoid werewolf on the planet, but the change had been noticeable, and good for him. The sweaters, the proper food in the kitchen cupboards that actually had doors on them, even a few cacti spread around, flowering in the sun. It all provided the illusion of a normal life, something that Stiles was severely lacking. 

Groaning, Stiles settled a crick in his neck and sighed. He took a tentative look around his room and grimaced. The walls were papered in articles and newspaper clippings, old ones that Stiles had taken to skimming to see if there was any evidence back then, at the very start of Beacon Hills, to suggest that the Hales hadn’t been the only supernatural fixture in this place. He had stacks of books piled up in odd places. One such stack provided a place for him to balance his drink before he went to bed. He had even wheeled in the large glass board in a fit of frantic researching, and now it was covered with scribbles and large, red question marks. 

It was possible that Stiles was a little paranoid, too. 

It just felt right, to collect as much information as he could. It was sensible. Knowledge was power, in its’ own way, and since Stiles didn’t have the strength or the claws or even the normal, human dexterity to fight off the bad guys, it only made sense that he found his own brand of power. Hence, alarming bedroom. 

There was a quiet knock on the window, and Stiles jumped so hard that his elbow crashed into the nearest pile of books and sent them slithering to the floor. He glared up a Derek’s impassive face, and then moved to open the window. 

“This is why people use doors, Derek,” Stiles explained. Derek slipped through the window and raised an eyebrow at the mess. “So that they don’t scare the living fuck out of people,” Stiles added, when Derek didn’t respond. 

“I did knock,” Derek said, shrugging. He stepped nimbly over the scattered books and perched himself in Stiles’ computer chair, looking for all the world as if he belonged there. Stiles pulled a face as his computer made an appreciative noise. Derek glanced from Stiles to the computer, then back again, and evidently elected to ignore their interaction. “What’s all this for?” 

Stiles looked around his room again and rubbed at his nose, shifting his weight from foot to foot. “Just research, mostly,” Stiles said reluctantly. “You know, bestiary kind of stuff. It’s better if we’re prepared.” 

Derek frowned. “It’s been quiet, apart from the clockwork creatures. And those are all destroyed now, Stiles, you saw the mess in the warehouse.” 

Stiles nodded slowly. “Yeah. Um, no? I’m not sure about the whole, ‘crushed to death by the cars’ thing that they’ve got going on. I think there might be more to it.” 

Derek abandoned whatever had brought him here in favour of leaning forward in the chair, elbows on his knees as he stared intently at Stiles. Stiles shifted, heat flaring on the back of his neck and spreading to his face, but he cleared his throat loudly and started to speak. “You know the light we found, the one that Deaton examined? He said it was a physical imitation of my spark, a sort of symbol of the belief and power that I have. It’s what brought those things to life, apparently.” 

Derek nodded. “I remember, I was there. Do you still have it?”

“Yeah, I’ve got it,” Stiles said, patting his desk drawer confidently. “It’s in there. It’s not hot or anything, it just looks bright most of the time. Every now and again it flares up and grows brighter, but other than that, it doesn’t really do anything.”

Derek just waited patiently, a peculiar softness to his gaze. Stiles stumbled over his words a little, taken aback and unsure why, but he steamrolled on, unwilling to try and decipher that look. Not yet, anyway. 

“Deaton said that essentially, this is the spark of life that I gave to one of the creatures, right?” Stiles waited for Derek to nod before he sat down on the floor abruptly and tipped over the box he had been sifting through. Dozens of tiny cables and cogs spilled out onto the floor with a clatter. They were dirty and singed and bent, mostly unusable, but Stiles didn’t want to _use_ them. For the moment, he wanted to study them. 

“Look how many creatures were with us in that warehouse,” Stiles said, gesturing wildly at the mess. He winced as he felt his arm twinge painfully and missed the frown of concern that Derek directed at his cast. “Dozens of them, plus the one that was in charge.” 

Derek was not a stupid person. Stiles watched as the pieces clicked together behind Derek’s eyes, watched the frown mar his features. “If more than one creature died in that warehouse,” Derek said slowly, “then why was there only one spark of life left behind?” 

Stiles grinned triumphantly. The pieces on the floor muttered and hissed irritably, and Stiles spared them a glance. They were just pieces, but these particular pieces put together made for a dark picture, so Stiles didn’t quite trust them. He began to scoop up each bit of bent metal and place it back inside the box. He couldn’t make himself be careless with them, no matter how much they set his teeth on edge. 

“Exactly. Not that it helps, oh, I don’t know, _at all_. What do we even do with this information?” Stiles grumbled, as he packed up the last few cogs. “Like, we know now that there should be more of these sparks, but we don’t know where they are.” 

“My guess is that someone took them,” Derek said, shrugging one shoulder. “We just don’t know who.” 

“Or where they are, or what they want with them,” Stiles added, spreading his hands out and regretting it. His arm was really beginning to ache. “We don’t even know what the sparks can do. So, really, we know next to nothing, other than the fact that we have to be careful again, because someone is probably going to try and kill us. Again.” 

“That’s more than we knew yesterday,” Derek said. His voice was surprisingly comforting. He smiled, and Stiles blinked at him. “Good work, Stiles. Now, sit on the bed.” 

Stiles did a double take. “Excuse me?” 

Derek stood up. “Or on the chair. Just not on the floor.” 

Cautiously, Stiles stood up, all the while eyeing Derek like he’d quietly gone insane whilst no one had been looking. Stiles wasn’t about to blame the guy if that was the case, unless Derek was about to try and eat him. He did as he was told, for perhaps the first time in his life, and collapsed carefully on the edge of his bed, eyebrows quirked as he waited for an explanation. Derek sat back down on the computer chair and scooted closer to Stiles, the wheels snagging a little on the carpet. Then he curled his hand around Stiles’ wrist. 

“What are you doing?” Stiles asked. Inexplicably, his voice shot up several octaves, so Stiles hastily cleared his throat and started again. “I mean, what are you doing?” 

Derek looked a little amused. “Taking your pain. Your arm’s hurting you. You should be more careful with it, idiot. It won’t heal if you don’t give it the opportunity.” 

“Great,” Stiles muttered. “A fortune cookie is holding my hand.” 

Derek actually laughed. It was surprising, and almost sad. Stiles stared at the way his eyes crinkled and his mouth curled happily, and he couldn’t help but thing that Derek was made to smile. Which made it all the more sad, that nobody had ever really given Derek much opportunity to do so. Stiles wondered, a little absent-mindedly, if Derek had smiled a lot when he was younger, if his sisters had teased him the way that siblings were meant to, if his mother had told him he was brave and clever, if his father had the same dry sense of humour. 

“Something wrong?” Derek asked, raising an eyebrow. 

“No,” Stiles said, smiling bracingly. “Nothing’s wrong. I was just thinking, less than a year ago and you’d probably be breaking my hand, rather than holding it.” 

Derek rolled his eyes. “Hardly. I never hurt you properly, unless you deserved it. And you were a brat, then, so you deserved it all of the time.” 

“Rude,” Stiles muttered, although he couldn’t really contradict that. Stiles had been a brat all of his life. He was pretty proud of that, actually.

“How are you coping?” Derek asked, suddenly. Stiles glanced at him, and he had a feeling that Derek had been waiting this entire time to ask him that. He looked a little out of his comfort zone, but there was still a determined look in his eye, like he wasn’t about to let a little discomfort stop him from entering into an awkward conversation. 

“Aw, buddy, I knew you cared,” Stiles said, winking. When Derek’s only response was to slide his fingers over the bump of Stiles’ wrist and over his fingers, Stiles swallowed and asked, “With the Spark thing?”

His arm was pleasantly painless by then, but Derek’s hand didn’t move away, and Stiles found that he didn’t want it to. 

“With all of it,” Derek said simply. “You’ve had this gift all your life, but you’ve never had an explanation. Being told what you are and what you can do can be overwhelming.” 

Stiles tilted his head. “You sound like you’re speaking from experience. I thought the Hale’s were all born wolves?” 

“I was,” Derek said. “We all were. But in some ways, that makes it harder. You grow up seeing your family able to shift at will, even though you can’t, not yet. And you see the other kids, the normal humans, completely happy with the way they are. It’s overwhelming, mostly because you’re something in between.” 

“You really are a fortune cookie,” Stiles said, grinning. “A good one, though. Not one of those crap, vague fortunes, or the ones that have lucky numbers all over it. Those are shit.” 

Derek said dryly, “Happy to help.” 

Stiles fiddled with the bedspread, keeping his eyes carefully averted. “I don’t feel any different,” he said haltingly. He was used to brushing over these topics with Scott, maybe hinting at certain things with his Dad, but with Derek, Stiles had always been brutally honest. “I keep thinking about what Lydia said, about me being crazy. She’s sort of right, isn’t she? It’s all in my head, really. Only, I’ve taken what was inside my head and moved it outside.” 

“I felt those memories,” Derek said, leaning forward intently. “They were real, Stiles. Real things that happened. And Scott saw the sand, when he was younger. I think they only stop being real when you stop believing.” 

“About that,” Stiles said, reminded suddenly. “The memory thing. You saw something that made you uncomfortable, didn’t you? I’m gonna take a wild guess here and say it was something to do with the Kanima?” 

Derek sat back, releasing Stiles’ wrist. Stiles wasn’t having any of that. Without thinking, he reached out and snagged Derek’s hand in mid-air, awkwardly lacing their fingers together. Part of him was sure that Derek was about to slap him away, or dive out of the window, based on his wide-eyed expression, but Derek just squeezed his hand lightly, sending a jolt through Stiles’ heart. 

“The pool,” Derek said eventually. “With the phone. You could feel it die.” 

Stiles snorted loudly, ignoring Derek’s glare, and pinched Derek’s hand. Derek glared even harder. 

“You do know that you’re worth more than a phone, right?” Stiles asked, half-joking. “At a push, you might even be worth more than a laptop.” He winked at Derek and counted it as a victory when Derek just sort of sighed at him. 

“Doesn’t change the fact that you felt it die,” Derek said. Stiles shook his head. 

“Yeah, I did, but I would much rather feel a phone – an inanimate object, except when I’m around - stop being real than watch you drown at the bottom of a pool, Derek, and if you don’t know that, then we’ve got more problems than how weird this is,” Stiles said, heart thumping as he held up their joined hands.

“Good weird, or bad weird?” Derek asked, but he smiled like he already knew the answer. 

Stiles grinned. “Definitely good.” 

*

“What’s wrong?” 

Stiles jerked around and dropped his spoon. Milk slopped over the side of his cereal bowl and splattered the table. He grimaced at the wet spot on his elbow and then sighed as he got up to get a dishcloth. Dad folded his newspaper in half and raised an eyebrow at Stiles. 

“Those things make you look like you were alive in the dark ages,” Stiles mumbled, nodding at the newspaper. “You know you can get your news on your phone now. When it’s actually _new_.” 

“Forgive me for not wanting to turn into an expressionless robot, glued to my mobile.” His dad made a dazed, stupid face that was obviously supposed to resemble Stiles. Stiles pointed a finger at him and shook his head. 

“Whatever that was, it was something to be ashamed of,” Stiles said solemnly. “Don’t give up your day job to become an impressionist, whatever you do. We’d die of hunger and then we’d be forced to use your newspapers to keep warm at night.” 

“Well I know I’ve been saying it for years, but you can quit your day job, and by that I mean, quit side-stepping my attempts at cleverly interrogating you by distracting me with stupid segues,” his dad said, taking a sip of his coffee. “Out with it. What’s going on?” 

Sties opened his mouth, and then his dad held both hands up. “And remember, we’re strictly on a ‘need to know’ basis.” 

Stiles shut his mouth again. “Well, what exactly did you class as ‘need to know’, again? Because there are some things that you might need to know, and there are things that the Sheriff definitely doesn’t need to know, so which you am I speaking to now? Just so I know.” 

His dad rolled his eyes. “Are the trolls dead? You said they were dead.” 

Stiles had been forced to tell his dad about the trolls, due to the giant, starkly bright pink cast on his arm. It wasn’t exactly something that would escape the Sheriff’s notice. “The trolls are dead,” Stiles confirmed, before hesitating. “Although we’re pretty sure that someone else is involved, someone who might have had an ulterior motive for making them in the first place. We’re still working on it though.” 

“But that’s not why you were staring into your cereal like it holds the secrets of the universe, is it?” Dad laced his fingers together on top of the table and stared hard at Stiles, who fidgeted in his seat and played with the loose ends of the dishcloth as he mumbled something incoherent. 

His dad sighed. “This wouldn’t have something to do with a certain Derek Hale, would it?” 

Stiles jerked out of surprise, and his dishcloth sailed into his cereal. Stiles stared at his bowl in dismay and then pushed the mess away, intent on setting his dad straight. 

“First of all, I have no idea what you’re implying by that,” Stiles said, holding up one finger. “And second of all, how did you even know he was here? You were at work. Have you put cameras in my room or something?” 

“Mrs Havishem saw him climbing in through your bedroom window the other day. She told me she was worried for your virtue.” 

“Nosy old bat,” Stiles muttered. 

“I told her you’d mow her lawn next Saturday.” 

Stiles spluttered, flailing his arms across the table and narrowly avoiding hitting his bowl for the third time. His dad sighed and shook his head. 

“I’m beginning to see how you broke your arm.” 

Stiles carefully avoided commenting on that – he had mentioned the clockwork creatures, calling them trolls for his Dad’s hearts benefit, but he had neglected to expand on exactly how he came to be wearing a pink cast. Roscoe looked as battered as he always did, so Stiles hadn’t even felt the need to bring up the fact that large, heavy vehicles were involved, or that he had exhausted himself magically. 

His dad didn’t even know that Stiles had magic. 

“Look, son, you know I don’t have a problem with you dating …” the Sheriff winced, searching for the right words, but Stiles was too busy trying to spontaneously combust so that he could avoid this conversation. 

“Males,” his dad settled on eventually. “It doesn’t matter to me.” 

“We’ve had this conversation before, Dad,” Stiles said pleadingly. “There were lots of masculine hugs and a few tears on your part, and we talked about scarring, traumatising things that will forever be ingrained in my mind, so how about we drop this line?” 

The Sheriff narrowed his eyes. “But you remember the law. You’re not eighteen yet, and Derek Hale was a criminal – _don’t argue_ , he was in the back of my cruiser, that’s good enough for me – so I want you to be careful, alright?” 

Stiles gaped at him. “We’re not even dating. He was there to talk about supernatural stuff, you know, the trolls and the person controlling them, not to do the horizontal mambo. Have you seen Derek? He’s made of muscle, Dad, pure muscle, whereas I? I am a _long, spindly noodle_.” He waved his good arm for effect, but his dad simply stared him down. 

“I assume that means that you’re taking everything I’m saying on board. Stick to curfew, no sleepovers, and hands above the waist. And if he hurts you, I have some of those Wolfsbane bullets tucked away in my drawer.” 

Stiles eyed him. “Who gave you those?” 

The newspaper came back up. “Chris Argent. Now, go to school.” 

*

The Diner was a little run-down thing out near the entrance to Beacon Hills, surrounded by small copses of trees and a couple of closed charity shops. Derek parked the car and left the keys dangling in the ignition. Stiles popped open the door and kicked at the gravel, generally unimpressed. There were only two other cars in the car park, and the Diner itself was pretty unappealing. Red, peeling paint and a broken sign, stickers on the grimy windows and rusty bike bars welcomed them as they strode towards the door. 

“Classy place,” Stiles murmured, just as Derek leaned over him to open the door. Stiles glanced up at him uncomprehendingly – the old Derek Hale would sooner have thrown Stiles through the door rather than open it for him. Sometimes, it was still mind-blowing to see how much Derek had changed, or rather, see how much he had reverted back to his old self, before the fire and Kate and Laura. 

“I’ve been in worse,” Derek said, nudging Stiles through the door. “Besides, we’re not here to observe the décor. We’ve got a job to do.” 

“Is this an honest-to-God stakeout?” Stiles asked, turning around so he was walking backwards, staring gleefully at Derek’s unimpressed face. Derek rolled his eyes and followed Stiles in. “Do I get binoculars?” 

They ended up in the corner, with a clear view of the door, the toilets and the counter. Derek sat opposite Stiles in the booth, their legs crushed together under the table. 

“It’s not so bad on the inside,” Stiles said drily, struggling to pry the menu off of the sticky table. Derek watched him in amusement before switching his smile to the waitress that walked slowly towards them, more interested in her phone than she was in her customers. 

After a full thirty seconds of waiting for the waitress to look at them, Stiles tapped his fingers against his jeans and narrowed his eyes at the phone. It made a soft, sizzling sound and went blank. The waitress stared it uncomprehendingly, tapped the screen to no avail, and then stared at them both, fuming. 

Stiles shot her a winning smile. “Coffee, please.” 

The waitress popped her gum, scribbled both of their orders down on the back of her hand and then stalked towards the kitchen without taking their menus, presumably because they had been glued to the service by hundreds of years’ worth of spills. Stiles slumped back in his seat and scratched at his nose before his eyes fell on Derek’s grin. 

“Subtle,” Derek said, shaking his head. 

“That’s what she gets for being an awful waitress,” Stiles said, making sure to keep his voice low. He didn’t fancy his chances if she heard him. 

“Careful,” Derek said, grinning. “She might spit in your drink.” 

“It’s going to taste like shit anyway. Spit would probably be an improvement in this place,” Stiles said, clapping his hands together. “So! What are we looking for exactly? You mentioned something about a scent?” 

Derek nodded. “Jackson actually caught it, when you guys were in the warehouse for the second time. He pointed it out when we went back to clean up the rest of the mess and get the car towed. It smells like tea and machinery, apparently, and old books.” 

Stiles frowned. “Odd combination. Although the old books could account for age. Maybe whoever took the sparks has been around for a while.” 

Derek shrugged. “We’ve seen weirder.” 

Stiles hummed in agreement, although he was slightly caught up in watching Derek’s shoulders. They were a thing of beauty. Part of him was wondering if this could count as a first date if both parties were unsure about each other and too stubborn to bring up anything awkward, like dating. 

“I don’t know what you’re thinking,” Derek said, “but I know that you’re over-thinking it. Just keep an eye on the car park, I’ll watch the other customers.” 

Probably not a first date, then. Derek seemed like the kind of guy who’d put effort into a date, a little bit of thought, instead of bringing him to a gross, outdated diner that hadn’t seen the good side of a duster in centuries. Plus, there was the whole not-actually-dating-thing that they had going on. Acknowledging the hand-holding had been a start, but that was it. Just a start. 

He was in the middle of planning a spectacular date in his head when he caught sight of a familiar figure skulking outside, near one of the parked cars. Stiles pressed his face a little closer to the glass and let out a low whistle. 

“Derek,” Stiles murmured. 

“I can smell it, the scent, but I can’t tell where it’s coming from.”

“Derek,” Stiles said again, tapping the table. 

“It’s like it’s all over the place. It doesn’t seem to be coming from any of the customers, either.” 

“ _Derek_ ,” Stiles hissed, slamming his hand down on the table. 

“ _What_ , Stiles?”

“It’s the waitress,” Stiles said. He slipped out of the booth and raced towards the door before Derek could stop him. He caught up to Stiles in the car park, eyes darting around the place. Stiles sprinted towards the car and skidded to a halt, where he’d seen the waitress disappear. 

“She vanished,” Stiles said, in awe. “She was twisting her phone round in her hand, then she looked up like she could see me and just disappeared, like that.” He clicked his fingers and then swore, turning in a circle. “How are supposed to find her now?” 

Derek sniffed the air. “It was definitely her, that scent’s all over the place. Why did she leave? She must have been on to us.” 

“I’m more concerned with how she left,” Stiles said, frowning. “I’ve never seen anyone just vanish before. That must take quite a lot of power. What do you think she is?” 

Derek frowned. “Nothing that I’ve come across before. You were right about the old books though. She might have looked young, but her scent is old, very old. Almost ancient, I’d say.”

“Did she look young?” Stiles asked uncertainly. “I can’t remember what she looked like.” 

There was a pause, and then Derek said darkly, “Now that you mention it, neither can I.”

They looked at each other, and then Stiles summed up the events in one simple sentence. 

“Well, fuck.” 

*

“She’s a witch,” Lydia announced, slamming a book down against the table with a deafening bang, right next to Scott’s head. Scott shot up in his seat and blinked blearily at Lydia, who curled her lip at his dishevelled appearance.

“Don’t mind him,” Stiles said. “He spent the night on Allison’s roof again.” 

“I’m up,” Scott promised, glaring blearily at Stiles. “You know this is a library though, right? We’re supposed to be quiet.” 

Lydia tossed her hair. “ _Please_ , it’s a school library. Besides, we’re the only ones in here and the librarian is too busy making out with her boyfriend between the stacks to bother with us.” She sniffed disdainfully. “He’s not even hot.” 

Stiles hummed thoughtfully and tilted his hand in the air. “So-so. The one with the stubble, yeah?” 

Scott snorted and dragged the book towards him with a slightly desperate look. “Please tell me this is boring enough to send me back to sleep, you know, so that I don’t have to listen to you.” 

Stiles narrowed his eyes and jabbed a yellow highlighter in Scott’s face. “After every traumatising sonnet you’ve burned into my brain regarding Allison and every single one of her flawless features, you could at least pretend to care about my non-existent love life.” 

“I do,” Scott said, flipping open the book and rubbing his eyes to get rid of the sleep, “but apparently we’ve got a witch to find, so finish comparing the librarian’s boyfriend to Derek and start reading, because I have no idea what any of this says.” 

“That’s because it’s in Greek,” Lydia explained helpfully, settling primly into her seat whilst Stiles choked on air. 

“Derek,” Stiles spluttered. “What? Who’s Derek? _Nonsense_. I don’t know.” 

“If it’s in Greek, why are you giving it to me? Are there pictures?” 

“Derek isn’t even… he wears _sweaters_.” 

“Turn it to page three-hundred-and-ninety-four,” Lydia said, rolling her eyes. “Stiles, you like his sweaters. I distinctly remember hearing you say ‘holy mother of deliciousness’ the first time he wore one in his presence.” 

Stiles balked. “If _you_ heard that…”

“We all heard it,” Scott said absently, flipping through the book with a determined look on his face. “Derek blushed. Why aren’t the numbers in Greek too?” 

“Fuck.” 

“He wears sweaters all the time now,” Lydia said. She patted Stiles on the head pityingly and then snatched the book out of Scott’s hands with a long-suffering sigh. She began to speak clearly in Greek, reading aloud, mouth twitching at the awed look that Scott directed at her. 

Stiles placed his head against the table and prayed for a swift death.

*

The witch’s cabin was out in the woods, nestled at the bottom of a little valley, surrounded by lots of thin trees that jabbed up out of the ground like needles, all of which were identical down to the last knot. If Stiles were to guess, he’d say that the trees and the cabin had been conjured up out of nothing. The little that he’d discovered on conjuring and magic suggested that things born of the imagination tended to be a little noticeable. You could stick an apple next to a conjured apple and they would look exactly the same, but the difference would still be obvious, you just wouldn’t know why. 

The trees were perfect cylinders of light brown wood, each one scored with a hundred little lines. Stiles tapped his finger against one as he leaned up against his Jeep, waiting for the rest of the pack to arrive. He glanced at Scott and groaned. 

“Please, tell me that you’re not texting Allison again,” Stiles said. He held up two fingers about an inch away from each other. “I am _this_ close to begging the Gods for a really specific lightning bolt.” 

Scott didn’t answer. He was too busy smiling goofily at his phone, fingers flying across the keys. Stiles winced and sent his condolences to the phone, which was scraped and scuffed and pretty badly cracked. 

“That’s a yes on the Allison front then,” Stiles muttered. “Why don’t you just wait for her to get here and have a conversation with her face to face?” 

“She’s not coming.” There was a pout on Scott’s face that Stiles would frankly find hilarious at any other given time, were he not busy scanning the surrounding area in case the witch decided to appear. It was ominously quiet, in a way that made Stiles’ hand itch for the familiar comfort of his bat.

“Why not?” Maybe it was a spell that kept away wildlife; the Preserve had always teemed with noise and flurries of movement, colourful birds and glossy sounds, small bugs and creatures scuttling along the twig-strewn floor, but Stiles couldn’t hear anything besides Scott’s breathing and his phones’ noises of discomfort. 

“Don’t press the keys so hard,” Stiles murmured distractedly, cutting over Scott’s rambling explanation of Allison’s dedication to Father-Daughter Saturday. Stiles used to do those sorts of things with his Dad, but recently, with all the supernatural shenanigans and Dad’s own responsibilities to the station increasing, it felt like they hardly saw each other. _Although Dad still manages to find the time to interrogate me_ , Stiles thought with a scowl.

Scott looked up from his phone with an easy smile. “That’s so cool, man. Weird, but cool.” 

“I’m glad you think so,” Stiles muttered. “My alarm clock woke me up at three o’clock the other day, shrieking like a maniac because a twig knocked into the window. It’s so jumpy, and I can’t even shove it in the wardrobe. Last time I hid it in my socks and felt like an abuser.” 

Scott wrinkled his nose. “That’s criminal, man. I’ve smelled your socks.” 

Stiles flipped him off. “Yours aren’t exactly a basket of roses, either, McCall.”

Derek’s laundry always smelled clean and fresh, with a hint of lily. Stiles had taken a sneaky sniff of one of Derek’s jumpers one day, feeling like the worst kind of pervert, and now the scent was rapidly becoming one of his favourite smells. Derek always smelled clean, except for when he was bleeding out in the middle of a battle. Then he smelled manly and glorious and delicious, like something Stiles wanted to lick. 

“Stiles.” 

Stiles snapped his head up and around. “Wha –?”

Scott was staring at him with exasperated amusement, shaking his head. “You were in another world, dude. Thinking about anyone in particular?” 

The way that Scott said it gave Stiles paused, and he opened his mouth, brow furrowed in confusion. Scott had a knowing grin on his face, sly and teasing, as he waited for Stiles to reply. 

“I realise that this just makes me sound guilty, but I genuinely don’t know what you’re talking about,” Stiles said, face blank. Scott snorted and shrugged, turning back to his phone, and Stiles flailed a little because that’s not an answer, Scott. He thought for a moment, drumming his fingers against the tree trunk, and then narrowed his eyes. 

“This has to do with what you said in the library, about Derek, doesn’t it?” 

“You got all flustered just because he held your hand,” Scott pointed out, without looking up from his phone. “I’ve never seen you with that many stars in your eyes, not even with Lydia.”

“This isn’t like with Lydia,” Stiles muttered, kicking the dirt with the heel of his foot. He didn’t need to look up to know that Scott was staring at him in surprise.

“I didn’t think you’d actually admit it, dude.” Scott broke off and tilted his head to the side, smiling. Stiles could practically see his ears prick up, but he refrained – just barely – from making a dog joke. “We’ll talk later, though. The guys are here.” 

Sure enough, Derek’s car appeared over the crest of the hill, followed by Lydia’s shiny new model. Stiles briefly wondered what being that rich would be like, but he was distracted by Derek’s rippling muscles and glorious scowl as the other man climbed gracefully out of his car, keys dangling from his index finger. He looked at Stiles and his scowl melted into something soft and private. Stiles felt something in his chest drop to his feet. 

“Hi,” he said stupidly, as soon as Derek drew near enough. Derek paused, raised an eyebrow, and then smiled wryly back. 

“Stiles,” he greeted. Then he narrowed his eyes. “You should have waited for the rest of us before coming out here. We don’t know what the witch can do.” 

Stiles rolled his eyes. “We didn’t exactly plan on coming out here. I didn’t wake up this morning and say, ‘What fantastic weather! Let’s go and find the evil cranky witch that wants to kill us!’ Scott just did his Labrador thing and sniffed it out.” 

“Yeah there’s nobody here, I checked,” Scott said, pocketing his phone. “Although I resent the dog joke. They weren’t funny before, man, so they’re hardly funny now.”

Stiles brandished his cast at Scott’s face. “They will always be funny, Scotty. Always.”

Jackson strode past them, making sure to crash into Stiles’ shoulder on the way. “Are we here to chat or search this place?”

Stiles rolled his eyes, but grudgingly followed Jackson inside. 

They set to exploring the place quickly, shrinking back from the dark corners where dusty, dirty items lay in waiting. Whomever the witch was, she wasn’t a fan of cleaning, and apparently didn’t own a feather duster. Stiles stuck to the shelves on the far wall, which were cluttered with odd, strange items, whilst the rest of the pack attacked the trunks and under the bed reluctantly. 

Stiles was poking grudgingly at the nearest shelf when he found it. 

It was a box. It looked like molten bronze, solidified into a clumsy cube. When Stiles picked it out from among the other odds and ends on the shelf, a thrum of static shot through his fingers. Frowning, he turned it over in his hands and glanced back up at the shelf. There were candles that had been burned down to the core, the wicks bent or snapped. Scarves of purple silk were folded up on top of each other. There were a few well-thumbed books and a pile of scattered cards, and other ordinary, if slightly out of place things. 

But the box was different. 

“Do you have any idea what that is?” Derek demanded suddenly, cutting through the chatter of the rest of the pack. Stiles knew he was talking to him because of the way his voice went sharp and high, like he was concerned but didn't want to show it. Silence fell around them, but Stiles didn’t bother turning around. 

“Not a clue,” he admitted. He didn’t take his eyes off of the box. 

“Then put it down,” Derek said, rolling his eyes. Scott snorted somewhere in the background, and normally Stiles would have offered him a fist bump or something for knowing him so well, but his hands were otherwise occupied. He didn’t put the box down, didn’t copy the others as they snooped about the Witch’s cabin, rummaging through her belongings. 

The box felt like silk as he glided his fingers over the metal surfaces. “Definitely metal,” Stiles murmured to himself. It might have even been real bronze; it felt heavy enough, but at the same time, Stiles could sense a strange hollowness behind the walls, as if there was a space inside for something small. He ran his fingers curiously over the edges, searching for a hinge or a catch, a way to open it up, but he found nothing but metal. 

“Stiles?” Scott’s voice was cautious, quietly concerned. Stiles hummed in acknowledgement, still intently examining the box. He brought it up to his face, so close that he could see every inch of his slightly distorted reflection. It was like looking in a pocket-sized funhouse mirror. 

“I think I know what the Witch was,” Stiles said loudly. There was a miniscule dent on the top of the box, the only discerning feature – just a small, hardly noticeable scratch. Stiles had a feeling that it was more than a scratch, that maybe if he got his hands on a magnifying glass, the scratch would begin to look more like an initial, a letter. 

“Actually, I think I know _who_ she was,” Stiles amended, certain that he had everyone’s attention. “I’m also pretty sure that you’re not going to like the answer.” 

Very, very carefully, he placed the box back on top of the shelf, right on the edge. Scott came up behind him, Derek close at his heels. Stiles shifted to the side, so that everyone could see the shelf. 

“Who was she?” Scott asked, brow furrowed. “More to the point, how did you work it out? We’ve only been here for ten minutes.” 

“Nothing in her diaries indicate who she is,” Lydia told them. “I can read Greek, but this is a strange adaptation of it. It might be a different dialect, something I haven’t come across before.” 

She dropped an old book down on top of the pile, frustration clearly etched on her face. A pile of dust rose up in the books’ wake. Lydia got to her feet gracefully, with Jackson’s aid, brushed down her dress, and then turned to face Stiles, arms crossed over her chest. 

“Didn’t we already agree that she’s just a Witch?” Isaac drawled from the back of the room. He had made no effort to join in with the search, regarding the room with an upturned nose and a doubtful expression. “You know, an old woman with an attitude problem and an aversion to werewolves?” 

Stiles didn’t bother looking at him – he already knew that Isaac would have draped himself in the most obnoxious position he could manage within the tiny confines of the cabin, scarf wrapped around his scrawny neck. 

“She’s definitely old, but I’m not sure about the rest,” Stiles said, frowning up at the box. “Watch this.” 

With a flick of a finger, he nudged the box over the edge of the shelf. They watched it plummet towards the ground, and then there was a small murmur of surprise as, an inch away from the floor, the box vanished. Stiles nodded triumphantly and then looked back up at the shelf expectantly. 

His mouth dropped open.

“It’s gone,” he said, surprised. 

“Good,” Derek declared. “I didn’t trust it.”

“There’s a shocker,” Isaac muttered. 

“I thought it would go back to the shelf,” Stiles muttered, ignoring them all. Scott managed to tear his gaze away from Allison’s latest text message in order to shrug at him. Stiles glanced around, but the rest of the pack seemed unbothered, too. Annoyed, Stiles ran his hands over the shelf, tossing scarves and cards onto the floor. A fact was a fact though, and the fact was, the box wasn’t there. 

“Well, that was exciting,” Jackson said. His zipped his jacket up definitively and strode towards the cabin door. “It stinks of dust in here and we have reservations for six.” Lydia smiled, reapplied her lip gloss, and then followed Jackson out of the cabin. 

“You need any more help?” Scott looked at Derek, eyes wide with hope. Derek looked down at the phone clutched between Scott’s hands and shook his head, smirking. 

“No, I think we’ve got everything we can out of all of this,” Derek said. “She’s not coming back here, anyway, not now that we’ve all been here. I expect she’s lying low. And by the looks of all this, she doesn’t have a coven, which is what I was worried about. You might as well go.” 

Scott grinned at him, fleeting, clapped Stiles on the shoulder and then jogged swiftly out of the cabin. 

“Wait, I’ll run with you,” Isaac called, and then he was gone too. 

“Stiles,” Derek said slowly, raising an eyebrow at Stiles’ consternated expression. “You said you knew who this Witch was? Anyone we need to be worried about?” 

Stiles looked back to the shelf, and then at the floor. Slowly, he shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. I guess I was wrong. If the box had gone back to the shelf, then it would have been pretty bad, but I guess the Witch isn’t the original owner of it. She must have stolen it from someone.” 

“So, where is the box, then?” Derek asked, frowning. 

“Probably in Greece,” Stiles said cheerfully, although part of him wasn’t so sure.

Derek blinked at him. “That’s quite a guess.” 

Stiles shrugged, hands in his pockets. “I’m pretty sure. Everything adds up to Greece, anyway. If I’m wrong, then we’ll probably get beaten up by a Witch with a werewolf aversion, like Isaac said.” 

Derek raised an eyebrow. “Something to look forward to, then.” 

Stiles snorted, and then let the conversation drop into silence that quickly became awkward. Stiles didn’t want to leave and face the mountain of homework waiting for him at home, but he also didn’t know what to do with himself now that his best friend had loped off with his two new significant others. Derek was still standing there, looking at Stiles intently, as though he were something in a petri dish that Derek couldn’t quite identify. 

“So,” Stiles said loudly, swinging his arms pointlessly back and forth. “I should probably –”

“Go out with me,” Derek interrupted him, and Stiles froze, mouth still open. Derek looked briefly annoyed with himself, and then he shook his head and tried again. “On a date,” Derek clarified. “If you like. We’ll avoid any shitty diners. And witches that may or may not be Greek and out to kill us.” 

Stiles stared at him with huge, wide eyes. “What?” 

Uncertainty flickered through Derek’s eyes. “You don’t have to, if you don’t want to. I just thought I’d make my intentions clear, in case you still weren’t sure.”

Stiles gaped. “Intentions?”

Derek huffed, but he looked more amused than annoyed. “Yes, Stiles, intentions. I thought that holding your hand would be enough to get it through your thick skull, but apparently not.” 

Stiles shut his mouth with a snap and narrowed his eyes. “Insulting me won’t get you into my pants, you know. Well, not immediately, anyway.” 

Derek pinched the bridge of his nose and made a small, exasperated noise. “I don’t want to get into your pants, Stiles.”

Stiles pouted. “Not even a little bit?” 

Derek’s mouth twitched, and then he fixed Stiles with a determined look. “I want to take you on a date,” he declared. “Ice cream, or something, or one of those disgusting milkshakes that you like so much, if that’s what you want.”

Stiles narrowed his eyes for an entirely different reason. “Those milkshakes are to die for.” 

“Quite literally,” Derek quipped. “It’s like a liquid heart attack.” 

“A delicious liquid heart attack,” Stiles corrected him, although his thoughts were elsewhere. His heart was buzzing with anticipation. “A date? Really?” 

Derek nodded slowly. Stiles watched as he bit on the inside of his lip, glanced at the perfectly steady set of his hands, and then to the nerves that quivered behind his hazel eyes. Not just hazel, Stiles thought, but all sorts of colours, and not just nervous, but also excited and hopeful. 

“No shitty diners?” Stiles asked, mouth twitching into a smile. 

“No shitty diners,” Derek promised him.

*

When Stiles got home, he collapsed against the front door for a moment. There was a goofy smile stretched across his face, but he made no attempt to hide it. He could still feel Derek’s mouth against his, and the scent of his aftershave seemed to cling to Stiles’ clothes. 

His dad appeared in the hallway, frown pulling at his mouth as he shifted several pieces of paper in his grip. He glanced up, did a double-take, and then gave Stiles a long, searching look. 

“Oh hell,” his dad said. His arms dropped to his sides and he groaned, long and low. 

“What?” Stiles demanded defensively, crossing his arms. “I haven’t done anything.” 

“Your stubble-burn says otherwise,” his dad said. Stiles’ hands leapt to his jaw before he could stop them, and he scowled when he felt smooth, unmarked skin beneath his fingers. Today had been one of the days when Derek had shaved, and Stiles felt like an amateur. 

His dad raised a triumphant eyebrow. 

“That proves nothing,” Stiles said, striding quickly towards the stairs. “I’m just jumpy because I live with a cop, that’s all.” 

“Not just any cop,” his dad called, as Stiles disappeared into his room. “The Sherriff!”

“There’s hardly any different,” Stiles yelled back. 

“I have access to more guns! Make sure to tell your friends. _All_ of your friends.” 

Stiles winced and shut his bedroom door. “That could have gone worse,” he mumbled to himself, running his hands through his hair. His computer beeped soothingly, and Stiles sighed and crossed the room, kicking off his shoes as he went. 

“Time for some serious gaming,” Stiles said decisively, not caring that he was talking to himself; it was a habit, by now, and his computer liked to listen. “And Cheetos. And then I need to call Scott up and torture him with details, because God, Derek can kiss.” 

He spun giddily on his chair, and then froze. 

There was a little bronze box sitting on top of his desk. 

Stiles stared at it, and then, he reached over and threw it out of his bedroom window. A moment later, there was a box sat in the palm of his hand. Spooked, Stiles did the exact same thing again and then slammed the window shut behind him. Another moment later, the box was clenched in his fist. 

Slowly, Stiles lowered himself back into his chair. He placed the box carefully on the desk and looked at it. His computer made a quizzical noise. 

“I don’t know,” Stiles muttered. It looked exactly the way it had in the cabin, bronze surfaces shining, the scratch of a letter hidden along one of the edges. Stiles tapped the unidentified mark with his index finger and sighed. 

“Another piece of an impossible puzzle,” Stiles muttered. His computer made another soft noise. “I thought it would go to Greece. Greece would make sense, I don’t understand.”

He lifted it up and held it at eye-level. 

“What _are_ you?” Stiles asked. “If you are what I think you are, then why come here? Why not go back to the cabin? Why not go to the witch, or Greece? Greece would have made sense.” 

“Do I even want to know why you’re talking to a box?” 

Stiles fell out of his chair. He landed in a graceless pile of limbs on the floor, blinking up at his dad. His dad simply sighed at him. “Your dinner is on the table,” his dad said, shaking his head as Stiles scrambled upright. 

“Awesome, thanks Dad,” Stiles said, shooting him an overly enthusiastic thumbs-up. His dad blinked at him for another minute before giving up and heading downstairs. The box, which had fallen to the floor and rolled across the carpet, vanished. Stiles tensed, glancing around the room, and then he felt a heavy weight in the pocket of his hoodie. When he looked, the box was there. 

Stiles sighed. "I think I'm gonna need help with this." 

*

They didn’t find the witch. The witch found them.

Stiles slipped through the park on his way to school, donut that he had confiscated from his dad’s cruiser shoved in his mouth. He sidled past an elderly couple and their abnormally small dog – Stiles loved most dogs, but the ones that looked like slightly enlarged rats could just fuck off – and grimaced in commiseration at a girl hauling a large bag full of textbooks down the path. 

The box was tucked inside his blazer pocket, and it banged against his hip with each long stride he took. He had taken the spark out of his desk that morning and placed it safely in his bag, which was slung over his shoulder. Part of him felt wrong, carrying both precious things around with him without any real protection, but he knew it wasn’t any less safe in his desk drawer. Besides, he was pretty sure that he didn’t have a choice when it came to the box; it seemed to enjoy following him around. 

He thought back to his phone call with Lydia last night and scowled.

_“You do know that there’s a chance this box isn’t connected with the monsters at all,” Lydia said. “There were a number of things in the witch’s cabin. That cube was just one of them. So far, it’s done nothing to suggest that it’s involved with the creation of mechanical monsters, or the strange lights you’ve made.”_

_“Sparks,” Stiles corrected absently, worrying at his lip. “Deaton called them sparks of life.”_

_“And you believe him? Usually you’re the first to disagree with the man.”_

_“No,” Stiles blew out a breath. “I mean – this is different. I can feel the life in them, in the sparks. They belonged to me, at one point. They’re mine. It’s the same story with the box, Lydia – I can just feel it. It’s connected with all of this somehow, connected to me.”_

_Lydia was silent for a moment, and then Stiles heard her sigh. “If that’s true, then you need to figure this out, Stiles. I don’t think this puzzle is for the rest of us. Figure it out. But do it later, for now I want to hear about your date with Derek.”_

Stiles bit viciously into his donut, smearing jelly all over his wrist. His cast was stained with all sorts of splodges and marks, brown rather than pink in most places. “Figure it out,” he muttered, adopting a high falsetto and feeling immediately guilty afterwards. He glanced over his shoulder to check whether Lydia was creeping up on him, murder in her eyes, but all he could see was the empty park. 

Well, almost empty. The girl with the books was only a few paces behind him. 

“I wish I could figure it out,” Stiles mumbled. He lobbed the rest of his donut towards a trashcan and let out a short _whoop_ as it went in. “And the crowd goes wild!” 

An ear-splitting wail ripped through his mind like a knife through paper, sending him staggering to the side. Stiles went down forcefully to his knees and cried out, hands scrabbling at the side of his head as the noise echoed piercingly. His ears were ringing and there was blood in his mouth; he had bitten his tongue.

Whispers snaked around his head. Stiles choked on a whimper and fell to the floor, curling up with his hands over his head. It _hurt_ , and everything was shaking, and there were these soft, insistent whispers everywhere, curling in the air like grey smoke, but he couldn’t just lie here. He had to get up. 

_Get up. Get help. Scott, Derek, anyone._

“Little animator.” The whispers shifted from smoke to satin. A shudder ran up Stiles’ spine. “That’s what I’m going to call you now. It’s fitting, isn’t it?”

 _Get help_. He couldn’t see the speaker from his position on the ground, but he could sense them behind him. Whoever it was had the strangest, most mesmerising voice he had ever heard. Silk and poison, smooth. It was the same voice from the forest, the one that had spilled from the mouth of the main creature, only magnified and infinitely more beautiful. 

“You give things life, that’s what you do. You animate things. That’s what he did, too. His spark was the brightest of all, the first spark on this ugly, destitute planet.”

Stiles groaned, rolling over, his cast crushed awkwardly underneath him. “Who are you? What do you want?” 

_Get help, please. Derek_. 

“Get to your feet, little life-bringer. Get to your feet so that I can cut you down again, and again, and again.” 

Stiles snorted, lowered his shaking hands. “As fantastic a deal as that sounds, I think I’ll pass, thanks. Death isn’t really an incentive.” 

“No,” the voice agreed, almost wistfully. “Death is a kindness.”

The noise faded. 

Stiles clambered to his feet, knees weak. His head still ached, but now that the noise was gone, he felt better. Steadier. He cradled his bad arm against his chest and stared dizzily at the figure in front of him. The park was a wash of green and gravel, the sky a haze of grey. Clouds were gathering in packs, ready to spill their evanescent tears. Stiles could hear noises from the far end of the park, but he was too busy staring at the figure to look and find the cause. 

She looked ordinary. A girl, maybe a head shorter than Stiles, with a mane of wild black curls. Her eyes were thin and narrowed at her him, and she had big, pouty lips. A ripped jacket hung from her round shoulders, and textbooks were scattered at her feet. It was definitely the girl from the coffee shop; he could recall her face, now that he was looking at it. 

“You are the witch, right?” Stiles said, rubbing his eyes. “You look like a sophomore.”

The girl arched an eyebrow. “You expected different? I was a schoolgirl when you encountered me in that disgusting establishment.”

Stiles’ eyebrows shot up his forehead. “Okay, you definitely don’t talk like a teenager. Derek said that you smelled ancient.” 

“Well, that’s a little rude.” 

“You’re one to talk about rude,” Stiles said, snorting. “You did just fry my brain and knock me to the ground. What was that, by the way?”

“My voice,” the girl said sweetly. “And I would gladly use it again, but you seem to have company.”

Something heavy knocked into Stiles, who yelped and staggered back as Derek inserted himself between Stiles and the witch. Scott was there too, growling and shifting, claws popping out of his fingers, and he could hear Lydia shouting something, her husky tone familiar. Stiles peered around Derek’s impressive torso and spotted Erica, standing side-by-side with Boyd. 

“Are you alright?” Derek demanded. His hands sketched the air around Stiles’ hips and drifted up to hover around his face. Stiles blinked up at his wide, bright eyes and recognised the tense line in his shoulders for what it was; worry. Derek was worried about him. He supposed it shouldn’t have been such a surprise, but it was. 

"How did you know I was in trouble?" Stiles asked, mouth dry. 

"Your phone," Derek explained shortly. "We all got phone-calls, at the same time, but you weren't saying anything. I was at the school, and I met these lot in the car park."

Stiles looked around Derek, at the path, and saw his phone lying on the ground, screen cracked. I suppose I did ask for help, he reminded himself. Apparently his phone had been listening. 

"Are you alright?"

“I’m fine,” Stiles reassured him quietly. “Not even a scratch, just a killer headache.”

Derek looked at him searchingly, and then he nodded, apparently deciding something. He leaned forward and pressed a precise, warm kiss against Stiles’ left temple. 

Stiles’ eyes fluttered closed. _Oh_. That was different. 

“How sweet.” 

Stiles’ eyes snapped open, and Derek growled lowly in his throat, turning around. He didn’t try to keep Stiles behind him, although he did mutter unhappily when Stiles marched around him and strode towards the witch. A hand on his arm stopped him from getting too close; Scott’s eyes were bright and angry. 

“This is her?” Scott confirmed. 

“'Her' has a name,” the girl said scathingly. “Although I’m certain that you would not care to learn it, creature.” 

“Actually, Scott’s about the only person who really would care to learn your name,” Stiles said, scratching his nose. “The rest of us just want you to get the fuck out of Beacon Hills so that we can walk to school without being attacked via super-sonic death beams.” 

“I want that too,” Scott protested. 

“And I don’t go to school,” Derek added.

“And I sure as fuck don’t _want_ to go to school,” Jackson said, appearing out of nowhere with a smirk. 

Stiles sighed and raised his eyes heavenward. “That’s great, guys. Helpful. Extremely helpful.”

Lydia rolled her eyes and paced forward, heels clicking against the gravelly path. “Who are you? And don’t be cryptic. Werewolves know when you’re lying.” 

The girl straightened her back and looked down her nose at them, lip curling. “I have no desire to be cryptic, and my name, is Pandora.” 

There was a beat of silence, and then the witch sighed. “It appears that this generation remains woefully uneducated on the important matters in life.” 

Jackson muttered, “Pretty big opinion of yourself, huh, lady?”

Stiles rolled his eyes so hard that they hit the back of his skull. “You are the last person in this galaxy – no, in all the galaxies, in fact – qualified to make comments on ego, of all things.” 

“Pandora’s box?” Scott asked, looking adorably confused. “I remember hearing that story in English. You’re that Pandora? The one who released all the bad stuff on humanity?” 

The witch snapped her head back and howled. It was a noise of pure grief and rage, of agony, and Stiles flung his arms over his head as though he were being attacked. When he managed to look up, he saw the wolves staggering around, hands scratching at their ears and Lydia staring, white-faced, at the woman in front of her. The witch’s eyes were burning and her hands were shaking, growing into sharp, thin claws.

Stiles no longer doubted who she was. 

“Alright!” he yelled. “Alright, you can stop screaming now. We believe you, alright?” 

“Do we?” Derek whispered, leaning in. “All she’s done in scream. She could just be a banshee, a wailing woman.”

Pandora lowered her eyes. “I care not if you believe me or not. You have taken something from me, and I want it back, now.” 

Stiles’ hand went to his blazer. The box was still there, accompanied by lint and an empty sweet wrapper. Pandora’s gaze sharpened, and her smile was as twisted. 

“Yes, little life-bringer. You stole my box, and I want it back.” 

Derek inhaled sharply. Stiles felt the world narrow to this little corner of the park, to the witch and the box in his pocket, smooth and cold under his fingers. Bewildered, he pulled the box out and stared at it, unable to believe.

“You’re telling me,” Stiles said slowly, “that this is Pandora’s Box. The box from the stories, the ones that held all of the deadliest things on the planet? The one that was given to Prometheus’s brother?” 

“Prometheus’s brother,” Pandora snorted. “Never a man by his own right, just by his relatives. I loved him, you know, but that doesn’t matter now. And as for the box, Stiles … Well, you already know what it is. You can feel it, can’t you? The hope inside.” 

Stiles swallowed.

Lydia narrowed her eyes. “It was a jar. In the original stories, Pandora’s box was a jar. It was a linguistic error that led philosophers to believe that it was a box, rather than a jar.”

“How do you know this?” Stiles muttered under his breath. 

Pandora bared her teeth. “Don’t talk to me of the old stories, child. I am the old stories. Back then, my face was different, my body was different, my _mind_ was different. The box was different too. But the stories were new, when I was in them. Things always change.” 

She held a hand out, palm up, and curled her fingers with a grim smile. The box began to spasm in Stiles’ hands, but he caught it just in time by the tips of his fingers. He looked up and glared at the witch, whose teeth were gritted in concentration. 

“Hey, lady,” Stiles said, clutching the box close. “Get your own box. This is mine now. Finders and keepers, and all that.” 

Pandora spat on the ground, and then said something in Greek in a murderous tone. She glowered at Stiles with such a look of hatred that he took a step back, surprised. It didn’t look like any old hatred; it looked personal, as though Stiles had stolen her pudding cup just for the pleasure of pouring it all over her head. 

“What did she say?” Scott asked, but Lydia didn’t respond. She was too busy staring at Pandora with surprise etched across her face. 

“She said, ‘just like him’,” Lydia said slowly, brow crinkling in confusion. She flicked her eyes at Stiles, who stared back, nonplussed. “Just like who?” 

Pandora’s eyes filled with tears. “I was built from clay and fire. The Gods breathed life into me. I was given the gift of weaving, graced with beauty, adorned with a voice that even the Gods themselves could not resist.” 

“That doesn’t sound like too bad of a deal to me,” Jackson said under his breath. 

Pandora fixed him with a burning glare. “It was all a lie,” she spat. “Every gift was a way of easing their own consciousness. They created me out of spite and anger, and they knew it was wrong, but they didn’t care. I was made for deceit. I was a _trick_. I was a trigger.”

Stiles swallowed past the lump in his throat. Pandora zeroed in on him, and Stiles stared into her hollow eyes and saw pain there, eons worth of pain. 

“Every trigger needs a trap,” she murmured and her eyes drifted down to the box. 

“They wouldn’t have given me a voice,” Pandora said hoarsely. “The Gods. They would have left me as I was, just a face and a figure, but they needed someone who could lie for them. Fitting, isn’t it? The first woman in the world, and I would have been voiceless, the way all women are in the face of men.”

“Just like who?” Lydia demanded. “You were talking about Stiles. Who is he like?” 

Pandora looked at her blankly. “You already know.” 

“Enough of this,” Derek snapped, edging closer to Stiles. “Just tell us what’s going on. The box is Pandora’s box, the one from the story, and you’re Pandora. Who is Stiles supposed to be?” 

Stiles shook his head sharply. “I’m not anyone. I’m definitely not someone out of a fucking Greek myth, you can’t honestly believe that, can you?” 

Derek met his eyes. “I’m not saying that you are. But she believes it.”

Pandora scoffed. “I said you’re like him, I never said you _were_ him. He’s a piece of your past, just as your mother and your father and their fathers before them are.” 

Stiles frowned. “I’m a descendant, then.” 

“A descendant of who?” Jackson asked impatiently, throwing his hands out. 

“Whom,” Lydia corrected him absently. 

"A man that I have hated for a thousand suns," Pandora said viciously. "A man that I will continue to hate until all of his descendants are dead, and my revenge has been exacted. Trust me, Stiles, when I say that I have nothing but pain in store for you. You may have destroyed my monsters, but they were just the beginning. Monsters can be rebuilt. Everything can be rebuilt. Everything _will_ be rebuilt." 

"Will you just tell us who I'm descended from?" 

Pandora smiled slyly. "You will not be surrounded by your wolves, forever, little life-bringer. When you are alone, you will lose what all humanity lost, many years ago. Hope. And that is when I will strike." 

"Who?" 

“Prometheus,” Pandora hissed, and then she was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! I hoped you liked it :) Leave a comment or a kudos on your way out, and my tumblr is "thealmostrhetoricalquestion" if you'd like to come and say hey :)

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading. If you could do all the usual nice things that would be lovely, thank you.  
> I also have a tumblr under the name thealmostrhetoricalquestion. Come say hello!  
> Thank you again ^_^


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